Anti-Black redefined as pro-equality, anti-gay as pro-family and anti-immigrant as pro-American.
In Tallahassee a march happened protesting DeSantis’s crusade against everything “woke,” a concept defined as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
DeSantis’s obsession has led him from attacking critical race theory to, now, restricting the teaching of Black history itself.
DeSantis is playing to the MAGA base in his craven quest for the presidency. He is trying to out-Trump Trump, to refine his cruelty to be more effective and less felonious.
This is a new version of the states’ rights movement, a movement that periodically resurfaces, as in the 1832 uprising that pitted South Carolina against the federal government in a fight over tariffs, to the Civil War itself, to the rise of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement required to bring it down.
He is exploiting anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-Black sentiments among groups who themselves are exploited, so that they fight one another — or at least don’t fight for one another — rather than throwing more of their energy into fighting him.
Fro example, Cubans, in general, don’t see themselves as a marginalized minority but rather possess an exile ethos that prioritizes affairs of the homeland.
When DeSantis flew Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, a poll found that half of Florida’s Hispanic voters supported the ploy. This is playing to a hidden, seldom talked about, racism inside immigrants that is disgusting and that they are carrying from their homelands.
This is another issue that could exploit a fracture.
A May Pew Research Center survey found that while the rest of the Democratic Party has undergone a dramatic shift on identity, a majority of Black Democrats still believe gender is determined by sex at birth. Forty-four percent of Hispanic Democrats agreed with that sentiment.
If these groups don’t unite to fight back soon, they could all lose in the end. The current policies being used to limit the teaching of Black history are broad enough that they could eliminate the course on the history of Cuban Americans. And other states are already beginning to imitate or compete with what DeSantis is doing in Florida.
We would do well to learn this lesson nationally. The attack is broad: sexist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic. The only way to fight it is together.