The earnest importance of "race" in the Florida and Georgia U.S. Senate races

The Sunday Sermon!

During the summer of 2020, as most Americans beat the sweltering summer heat by remaining inside due to a Covid-19 plague that was claiming thousands of lives each day, I was tapped that July by Dr. John Thomas III, my Morehouse Brother and the editor of the AME Church's flagship media organ, The Christian Recorder, to interview U.S. Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla) on its Facebook live show—the TCR Dialogues. 

At the time, Demings was prominently mentioned as a running mate for then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and our live streamed segment was so successful that after chatting with my friend, Tallahassee based media producer Gerald Tookes (also a Morehouse Man), we soon launched the Hobbservation Point Podcast, one that allowed me in a way to actualize my humorous nickname, "Oprah Winfrey," that one of my best friends, Kenny Taite, coined during our Morehouse school days due to my elongated conversations with women friends in the AUC 😆.

To my delight, the very first person that I interviewed in August of 2020 was Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church—the pastoral home of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King during the bulk of his Nobel lauded civil rights advocacy. Warnock, who was a senior at Morehouse during my freshman year in 1990, was set to challenge Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the then wealthy owner of the Atlanta Dream, in a state that had not had a Democratic Senator since the late Max Cleland left the Senate in 2003. 

During our segment, I was setting the backdrop to ask Warnock whether Georgia, a state that was heavily red "Trump country" in most areas outside of Atlanta, was ready to elect a Black man? Well, I didn't get that far because, true to the adage that "you can tell a Morehouse Man but you can't tell him much," good Brother Warnock politely cut me off while strongly suggesting that the "new" Georgia most certainly was ready and able to push past its segregation era and post Jim Crow past to send him to Washington. Cognizant of not only what Brother Warnock said but "how” he said it, I conceded the point on air—even if I still held my private concerns. 

Well, Warnock proved prescient, as he defeated Loeffler and was sworn into the Senate two weeks after the MAGA riots found the Confederate battle flag that once flew defiantly over Georgia during the Civil Rights Movement, flying in the Capitol Complex in the wake of six lives lost—and millions of dollars in property damage—all due to the right wing lie that Joe Biden "stole" the election. 

During that same period in early 2021, while Demings had lost out to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca) for the "veep" stakes during the previous summer, she was already planning her very own senate race, one in which she would give up a relatively safe congressional seat in hopes of making history by becoming the first Black U.S. Senator from the Sunshine State! 

For President Joe Biden and his agenda, perhaps no two races this Fall are more important than Sen. Warnock's bid to defeat his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, and Rep. Demings's race to replace Sen. Marco Rubio (R). 

For history lovers, that both races have racial minorities vying for positions that were held by arch segregationists in the not-so-distant past is interesting—even when the candidates have starkly different stances on the importance of race in modern politics. Clearly, Democrats Warnock and Demings have been staunch advocates for racial redress throughout their public and private careers, while Republicans Walker and Rubio both have stretched to extreme lengths to pretend as if systemic racism is a relic of America's Jim Crow past, like most minority quislings tend to do!

With a U.S. Supreme Court that has a conservative super majority thanks to former President Donald Trump's successful appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the bench, if you thought that the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of Federal abortion rights was bad during the last term, court watchers predict that affirmative action, tougher strictures on proving discrimination according to race, gender, and sexual orientation, and a complete gutting of the Voting Rights Act could be on deck in the term that began on October 1st. Such rulings would allow Republicans, particularly in the Deep South, to offset their numerical minority status across the country in a way that allows them to gerrymand congressional districts and dilute Black and non-Republican Brown voting blocs for the next forty to fifty years. Thus, the critical importance of a Democratic congressional majority to help offset these judicial rulings cannot be adequately weighed in a 600 word op/ed piece.

Separately, but equally important, is that the conservative agenda that Rubio and Walker willingly follow is one that the majority of Americans simply don't agree with; arguably, Demings' most effective campaign commercial this season is one in which she reminds that she was a police officer and chief who investigated rapes and sexual assaults during her career—and how Rubio supports charging women who are victims of rape with crimes, up to and including murder by some proprosals, if they choose to abort. 

One state to the north, Warnock is running on his impressive record in the Senate, where he has been a tireless advocate for building up America's infrastructure, supporting farmers and manufacturers alike with Federal financial assistance, addressing food insecurity, and lowering the costs of insulin and other prescription drugs.

Warnock's opponent, the painfully inarticulate and prodigiously ignorant Walker, not only has no real professional accomplishments to run on outside of reminding how he ran a football in the professional ranks, but he also has proven to be a notorious liar whether claiming to be class valedictorian (God forbid), training with the FBI, and the more recent controversy that, despite claiming to be anti-abortion like most Republicans, that he impregnated women—and paid for the abortion procedures—despite his family values rhetoric!

While mid-term elections typically feature lower turnout than presidential year elections, the stakes are very high this year as far as preventing the GOP from taking control of the Senate in a way that would stymie any further progress on voting rights, taxes, immigration, and food and energy costs by the Biden administration. For those reasons alone, the Hobbservation Point encourages every rational Democrat, Independent, and moderate Republican voter in Florida and Georgia to send Sen. Raphael Warnock back to the Senate along with a new chamber mate—Sen. Val Demings!