Source: Joe Raedle / Getty
Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is running his campaign on racism and calling it equality. Certainly, this is a thing that can be said about most Republicans running for any office, but courting the “fighting racism is the real racism” vote seems to be DeSantis’ chief strategy along with his weird little obsession with eradicating any and all discussion about gender identity. Either way, it appears that DeSantis sees himself as a civil rights leader in the Jim Woke era, but for Black people, people of color and folks in the queer community, he’s just another white Christian nationalist engaging in the American tradition of moving in bigotry and framing it as patriotism and a defense of “God given” rights.
Over the weekend, DeSantis released a video ad where he declared that “DEI is over in the state of Florida.”
First of all, at some point, it becomes clear that DeSantis and other GOPropagandists prefer to use the “DEI” acronym, because if they said things like, “diversity, equity and inclusion are over in the state of Florida,” it would make red states appear to be exactly what many of them are—utopias of white supremacy.
And make no mistake: It is white supremacy.
What DeSantis and other Republicans are doing is taking a belief that most surveys show is only widely held by white people, and more specifically, white conservatives—the belief that racism in America isn’t significant—and turning that belief into policy. That’s absolutely the way systemic racism works. That’s what critical race theory is meant to examine.
“The whole experiment with DEI is coming to an end in the state of Florida. We are eliminating the DEI programs. We are going to treat people as individuals. We are not going to treat people as members of groups,” DeSantis said in a press conference featured in the video. “DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination, and that has no place in our public institution.”
So, basically, DEI is discrimination against white people. But what else can one expect from the governor who tried to dilute Black voting power by redistricting his state’s congressional map in a way that breaks up a predominately Black voting district, which he said would make the district “race-neutral?” (Of course, we’re all still waiting for his attempts to make predominately white voting blocks “race-neutral,” but that would be anti-white discrimination, amirite?)
At the end of the day, white conservatives need to believe that merit is the reason white people have historically dominated corporate America and higher education. That’s the reason for their war against CRT, DEI and non-whitewashed American history curricula. Why draw attention to the fact that for the vast majority of America’s existence, Black and brown people haven’t had nearly the same access to the “American dream” that white people have enjoyed?
It’s easier and far more convenient to simply say, “OK, everything is equal now, and any new policy to further racial progress is actually racist against white people.” That was the energy the Supreme Court used when it struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And DeSantis knows his path to the presidency is paved by stoking white grievance and calling it a fight to “treat people as individuals.”
The irony would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous and racist.
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