By Robert Slater
There are elections, and then there are hinges. Moments where a state does not simply choose a senator, it chooses whether an entire people gets to keep a seat at the table for the next decade or gets locked out of the room entirely. November is one of those hinges for Black Texas. And I will not pretend otherwise to make anyone comfortable. Start with what the numbers already told us. In the March primary, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett swept the ten counties with the largest Black populations in this state by roughly 24 points.
In Jefferson County, nearly 60 points. That was not noise. That was a verdict. Black voters looked at the choices in front of them and rendered judgment with the only tool no one can take from us at the ballot box, our own hand on our own vote. James Talarico became the nominee anyway. What he does with the community that did not choose him first is now the whole test of his candidacy. To his credit, he has tried. Black churches, HBCUs, a commencement address at Paul Quinn College, a maternal mortality plan aimed at a crisis that has quietly devastated Black families for generations, endorsements from Commissioner Rodney Ellis and Divine Nine organizations, Barack Obama at his side.
None of that is nothing. But state Representative Barbara Gervin Hawkins, who chairs the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said the quiet part out loud: Black Texans are angry, they feel disenfranchised, and they feel used. Two thirds of Black voters currently support him. Compare that to the nearly 90 percent Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred each pulled from us in their own Senate runs, and the gap stops looking like a rounding error. It looks like a warning shot. State Senator Royce West put it in terms I have heard from organizers across this state for years.
He sees good faith. He has also seen good faith before that evaporated the moment the votes were counted. That is not bitterness. That is a community that has been asked to trust first and be rewarded later, again and again, and has learned what usually comes after the asking. Talarico did not invent that pattern. But he is the one standing in front of it now, and earning our vote, not assuming it, is the only path through. Here is where I have to stop being diplomatic, because diplomacy will not save us from what is actually on the other side of this ballot. If Ken Paxton wins this seat, it will not be a normal loss. It will be the closing of a door that may not open again for a generation. Texas Republicans have already redrawn the congressional map to strip power from Black and Latino communities for the next decade.
A federal Voting Rights Act gutted by the courts no longer stands between us and
Based on reporting by African-American News and Issues – Dallas.
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