Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
As a Black man, I found the US Senate race between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker a particularly painful one to watch, observe and analyze. The assumption that a Black football player whose celebrated symbolism in Georgia would be enough to split the Black vote thankfully went unrealized, but the reality that a number of White Georgians were willing to support Walker underscores the troubling questions ahead for a country mired in division and bracing for former President Donald Trump’s bid for his old office in 2024.

I’m relieved that Warnock, who serves as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. once led, defeated woefully unqualified Walker and claimed a full six-year term. His victory in a hotly contested race represents a triumph of substance over cynicism.
Walker possessed absolutely no credentials to become the Republican Party’s Senate nominee, other than being a famous former athlete friendly with Trump.
Yet Walker, who starred as a running back during the early 1980s at the University of Georgia, turned this contest into a race to the bottom and ran a campaign whose toxic imprint won’t fade away so easily. Backed by Trump (who reportedly personally recruited the Heisman Trophy winner to run against Warnock) and a MAGA movement running on fumes, Walker served as an extreme manifestation of the ongoing misunderstanding and disrespect of the Black community by the Trump wing of the GOP.
I grieve for the parts of America that enthusiastically embraced Walker’s candidacy. Some people are hopelessly unaware of the negative message their support of him sent to millions of Black Americans, who won’t soon forget it.
The GOP embrace of Walker represents an American tragedy. Walker’s behavior on the campaign trail included incoherent ramblings about movies and farm animals, nonsensical asides that went nowhere and dancing in front of overwhelmingly White audiences in bizarre scenes that recalled the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era. The whiff of the Jim Crow era’s objectification of Black men as intellectually feeble but physically powerful grew stronger as Walker’s humiliating campaign continued to showcase the GOP’s failure to understand or connect with Black voters.
Yet the allegations that Walker serially abused women, traumatized his son Christian (who has openly criticized his father’s fitness for public office), engaged in extramarital affairs and pressured women into abortions did not prevent just over 48% of Georgians from supporting him. When pressed by reporters, Walker (who denied some of the allegations of violence against him and has cited mental health issues but hasn’t denied being violent toward his wife) rejected the abortion allegations. “You know, I’m done with this foolishness,” he told reporters. “I’ve already told people this is a lie.”
<div data-uri="archive.cms.cnn.com/_components/video-resource/instances/h_d722d67fd55d3c5c4317b1b02285cce6-h_ad6ee7fdf17c1acf55cedafc29004672@published" data-component-name="video-resource" data-editable="settings" class="video-resource" data-video-id="politics/2022/12/08/gop-georgia-midterm-reaction-lindsey-graham-john-thune-ac360-vpx.cnn" data-live data-analytics-aggregate-events="true" data-custom-experience data-asset-type data-medium-env="prod" data-autostart="false" data-chromeless="false" data-show-ads="true" data-featured-video="true" data-headline="Hear what Lindsey Graham said about some GOP blaming Trump for party losses" data-description="In the wake of the loss of former President Donald Trump's hand picked challenger Herschel Walker to Sen. Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate race, the Republican blame-game has begun." data-duration="01:05" data-source-html=" – Source: CNN ” data-fave-thumbnails=”{"big":{"uri":"https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/221208002153-liindsey-graham-december-7-2022-screengrab.jpg?c=16×9&q=h_540,w_960,c_fill"},"small":{"uri":"https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/221208002153-liindsey-graham-december-7-2022-screengrab.jpg?c=16×9&q=h_540,w_960,c_fill"}}” data-vr-video data-show-name=”Anderson Cooper 360″ data-show-url=”https://www.cnn.com/shows/ac-360″ data-check-event-based-preview data-network-id data-details>
