After Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the end of his 2024 presidential campaign on Sunday, Black Floridians are slamming the state’s chief executive, who they say built his White House run on punching down Black and other marginalized communities across the state through policy and legislation.
“Governor DeSantis used his climb to his presidential campaign on the backs of Blacks, on the backs of the LGBTQ community, on the backs of immigrants,” said Shevrin Jones, a Florida state senator representing the Broward and Miami-Dade areas.
“He tried to ride a discrimination, anti-Blackness wave that he thought would resonate in America.
“There’s no vindication for us as a people just because he’s not running for president anymore,” Jones told theGrio. “While he’s still in office, he’s still a danger, not just to Black people, but he’s a danger to democracy.”
Since entering the governor’s office in 2019, DeSantis has prioritized how race and Black history are taught in Florida public schools. In 2022, he signed into law the “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricts critical race theory, a catchall phrase for Republicans to describe how race is discussed in classrooms.
DeSantis targeted the graduate school-level curriculum and vowed to ban it from schools (despite not being taught in them) because it teaches children to “hate this country” and “hate each other.”
Most recently, DeSantis barred the state’s 28 public colleges from using state and federal funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, activities, and policies. His administration also previously banned an advanced placement African-American history course for high school students and sanctioned a new curriculum teaching middle school students that enslaved Black people benefited from slavery because they developed needed skills.
“We knew what he was doing in Florida by creating the cultural wars that would not translate…
Read the full article here