Walker stood up at podiums, and I felt anger and shame and sorrow. He is incoherent, bumbling, oily. He smiles with a swagger that does nothing to disguise his total ignorance of everything, of how blatantly he is being taken advantage of by a party that has never intended to serve people who look like him.

An African-American man in the South working on a White-owned field.

Walker’s candidacy is a fundamental assault by the Republican Party on the dignity of Black Americans. How dare they so cynically use this buffoon as a shield for their obvious failings to meet the needs and expectations of Black voters? They hold him up and say, “See, our voters don’t mind his race. We’re not a racist party. We have Black people on our side too.” Parading Walker at rallies like some kind of blue-ribbon livestock does not mean you have Black people on your side. What it means is that you are promoting a football-turned-charlatan, a man morally and intellectually bereft enough to sing and dance on the world stage against his own best interest. Is he in on the joke? Does he know they picked him to save money on boot black and burnt cork, this man who made his name by bringing the master glory on the master’s field? Herschel Walker reminded me of  Boobie Miles in the film Friday Night Lights, exploited and denigrated and broken by Whitey. Boobie Miles suffered a career-ending injury, his broken body behind as the team carried on, his dreams, nothing to them, his legacy, utterly compromised, much like Herschel Walker underwent public humiliation which utterly compromised his professional legacy. His many trophies are now and forever eclipsed by the humiliating spectacle of his political foray. He is ruined, and the party that propped him up does not care, they're trashing him and blaming him for not winning.

And I won't get over this because once again people voting Republican are voting for the power to destroy everybody they do not like instead of voting for decency and intelligence and faith and humanity and the power to help everybody. The Republican party has proven time and again it is willing to destroy a man to advance its cause, and Republican voters keep voting for it. I don’t particularly care that Herschel Walker doesn’t seem to know he’s being used. I care that America let it get this far,  I care that this country has been wildly careless with Black bodies, Black stories, Black truths. His candidacy was a tragedy. Running Herschel Walker demonstrated the Republican party's perpetual contempt for American government and American ideals and common decency and family values, contempt for the oath of office and serving the American people, contempt for justice, contempt for working towards a more perfect union.

It feels like just a few days ago Hershel Walker to me was a hero of the Dallas Cowboys cocaine hurricane era, with a stacked college football career, a Heisman Trophy winner (and he won the Heisman over John Elway), endless nfl yardage and an ocean of nfl touchdowns, an NFL marque player everybody cheered. Now all I see is a woman beater who paid for abortions, neglected his children, threatened to kill his children, threatened people with guns, lied about everything at all times, doesn't care about the planet, doesn't care about the government or the American people or America or the planet, and has no interest in learning how to coherently speak. All I see is a piece of shit terrorist.