News, Herschel Walker Once Said He Was the Target of Racism. Now He Claims It Doesn’t Exist.: detailed suggestions and opinions about Herschel Walker Once Said He Was the Target of Racism. Now He Claims It Doesn’t Exist..
The GOP candidate has a history of making curious, confusing, and bizarre statements about racism.
Not too long ago, Herschel Walker said he had experienced racism, having been stopped and harassed by the police because he was a Black man. And he expressed his fear that police will abuse his son because he’s Black. Yet during his campaign for Senate in Georgia, Walker, the Republican now in a December 6 runoff against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, has repeatedly declared that racism does not exist in the United States. This is all part of a confusing series of remarks about American racism that Walker has made in recent years.
In July 2020, a year before he would announce his Senate bid, Walker appeared on the podcast of David Harris Jr., a Black conservative, and discussed assorted matters relating to race. Referring to his son, Walker noted that he was “afraid if the police stop him because he’s Black.” Moreover, Walker recalled his own troubling encounters with law enforcement officers: “I’ve been stopped by the police. I’ve been harassed by the police before.” Discussing one incident when he was pulled over by cops, he said, “Why in the world are you gonna stop me? Because I’m Black and drive an SUV? And then they saw my name and they said, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘I know what it was.’”
Walker told Harris he was upset by this episode: “Was I hurt? Yes. Was I mad? Yes.” He characterized the event as racial profiling. Though he was not yet a Senate candidate, he said that he wanted to “change that mentality [of the police] by going to Washington and getting more money into training police officers.” The goal was to address racism: “Put the programs in place so that [the police] can see that all Black men are not monsters. All Black men, when you meet them, are not monsters. All Hispanic kids are not monsters. That we’re not all criminals.”
During this interview Walker also expressed his support for Donald Trump—who became an owner of the New Jersey Generals football team shortly after it signed Walker in 1983—and denied Trump was a racist. Walker acknowledged the existence of racism while downplaying its significance within American society: “I know that things are not better, but they’re better than they were yesterday.” Walker put forward a narrow definition of racism that seemed pegged to the civil rights protests of the 1960s: “Racism is when you have the dogs that’s gonna attack you. Racism is when you have these police officers with billy clubs coming to hit you in the head because you’re in the wrong place.”
It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what Walker is saying. Talking with Harris about his opposition to Black Lives Matter, he said, “That’s what’s so great about America, United States of America, we can say no. You remember that Nike slogan: ‘Just say no’? Now you can’t just say no because you’ll get in trouble. But you can’t say no because—oh jeez—you’re racist, or you’re an Uncle Tom…Guys, I’m as Black as you can be.” (The Nike slogan is “Just Do It.”) All in all, in this interview Walker presented a convoluted picture. He had been a victim of police racism and he was worried his son would be. This was a recognition that racism did exist. Yet Walker downplayed criticisms of American racism.
A few weeks earlier, on a different podcast, Walker had also dismissed criticisms of racism: “In Washington, all you hear is the word ‘racist.’ ‘You’re a racist.’.. They use that word like it’s just easy…Racism is something when people are harmed. That’s what racism is, when people are harmed, people are shot…That is what racism is. Racism is not, ‘I don’t like your beliefs.’”
There’s something I wanna talk about. When I saw they wanted to bring race to get you quiet—that’s what they trying to do. They’re trying to fool you because when you start arguing with people the first thing they say is that you’re a racist. I’m gonna tell you something, and it’s gonna help you out, and it might hurt some people’s feelings, but if you do, if you like that, it won’t be that bad. You’re not a racist unless you’re 185 years old in today’s world. You have to be 185 years old because you have to learn that from your parents. Because maybe they don’t know any better, and that’s okay. You’re not a racist today because they have television, they have the internet, they have something else to show you that we’re all the same. So you’re not a racist, you’re just stupid. If you haven’t learned yet that we all bleed, we all work, we all do the same thing you’re not a racist. So if somebody calls you a racist don’t worry about it.
As a Senate candidate, Walker has fully embraced and advanced racism denialism. In a campaign speech in September 2021, Walker said, “Don’t let the Left try to fool you with this racism thing. This country isn’t racist.” The next month, on the UFC Unfiltered podcast, Walker declared, “We don’t have racism” in the United States. He said he was running for Senate to counter “all this [talk of] racism, this woke theory. This is the greatest country in the world.” At a campaign event in May, Walker appeared to suggest racism wasn’t real. “Where is this racism thing coming from?” he asked, asserting that the charge of racism was deployed only to censor people.
