Can one man represent an entire race? My skin is black — do I represent all Blacks? My good friend is white — does he represent all Whites? If we are indeed representatives of our races, do we possess superpowers of sort?
Apparently, Tim Walz does. The former Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor was on a listening tour across the country when he stopped by Harvard’s Kennedy School for a talk. He told the audience that Vice President Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate, because ‘I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck (and) put them at ease.’ He added that he was the ‘permission structure’ for the White man to vote for Democrats.
There you have it. The self-appointed man of all White men. The one that has the ‘code’ to talk to White men and command him as he may.
It is hard to believe that such stupidity exists in the year 2025. There is no lowlier man than the one who thinks of himself in racial terms. And Walz is such a man.
If you believe I am being harsh, then explain what value is to be had in thinking of oneself in racial terms? Walz was a failure since he clearly didn’t deliver the White man in enough numbers to win Harris the presidency of the land. So, I ask again what value is to be had?
Is the man so delusional that he thinks he holds a mystical grasp on whiteness?
I don’t even think he thinks this far. His kind of whiteness for him is a virtue of sorts and this is precisely my point here: for him whiteness means racism. Walz’s virtue lies in believing that his white skin is racism personified and that he is guilty of all the privileges that come with it. He believes that all whites share this same guilt.
Commentator and author Shelby Steele calls this white guilt. But it’s not actual guilt. Rather, it is the desire to see oneself as innocent of racism — to dissociate oneself from America’s racial past.
When Walz ‘confesses’ to the racism of his white skin, he believes he’s achieving innocence of America’s racist past. And he believes that as a man who knows the racism of his skin, he must return to his ignorant tribe and deliver them from their inherent racism into innocence.
But since an individual man cannot represent a race, we are left with nothing but yet another all-American racial absurdity. How many more of these absurdities must we endure? How much longer will we continue to believe that the use of race can lead us anywhere positive?
If the absurdity of Walz doesn’t wake us up, then what will?