The Contentious and Isolating Role of Race For Black U.S. Senators

Last week, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were sworn in as United States senators. Their induction to the Senate meant that Democrats had officially taken control of both chambers of Congress. The moment also marked the first time a Black man was sworn in as a senator from the state of Georgia as Warnock was welcomed as the 11th African American in the Senate by none other than the nation’s new Vice President Kamala Harris.

Having been the second Black woman to ever serve in the U.S. Senate herself, the image of Harris swearing-in Warnock felt momentous. However, this wasn’t a moment occurring in a vacuum; it comes just weeks after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building. So, how can we make sense of Warnock’s historic election amid rising white supremacist violence and widespread attempts to disenfranchise Black voters? 

Listen: Raphael Warnock’s historic rise to U.S. Senator. 

Guest

Theodore R. Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and the author of the forthcoming “When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America.” Johnson recently wrote a feature in the New York Times titled “Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator.” According to Johnson, Warnock’s ascension to the Senate was historic for a number of reasons. “Warnock’s election is significant not just because he was the first Black senator from Georgia, not just because he was the first Black senator from the south that was first elected to the Senate via popular vote… and Warnock is just the fourth Black senator from the south period,” says Johnson. 

The promotion of Kamala Harris to the vice presidency and Raphael Warnock to the Senate comes during a period of inflamed racial resentment, striking an eerie resemblance to the political climate of nearly 150 years ago. Johnson points out that the legacy of Dred Scott, a Supreme Court ruling from the 1850s that asserted Black people could never be citizens in America, endures to this day. “The question of Black people’s place in America, the question of how fully and truly American we can be is what was at stake… and frankly we see echoes of the same discussion today,” says Johnson. He adds that Former President Trump rose to political acclaim by promoting birtherism conspiracy theories. “It is really distinctive in the way that Black citizenship has been questioned in our nation’s history and ways that white citizenship has been assumed to be inherently compatible with what it means to be American,” says Johnson. 

Web story written by Clare Brennan.