The hypocritically racist realities of Ron Desantis's anti-Riot law
Ol' Hobbs's Thursday Thoughts!
During the 2018 gubernatorial race between former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and then U.S. Rep. Ron Desantis, one of Gillum's most humorously profound debate retorts was when he told the moderator and a worldwide audience, "I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist."
Gillum's clapback clearly angered Desantis and many of his supporters, but where I was (and remain) at a loss was why this truth was so upsetting? I pose this question at the beginning of today's Hobbservation because over the past week, Gov. Desantis has proven once again that what Mr. Gillum said was accurate, this time in his blatantly differential treatment of peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters last summer, and his full support of peaceful Cuban American protesters in South Florida this week.
It is important to note that I spent quite a bit of time around the Desantis types in law school and the early part of my career in Tallahassee, Florida's capital, during political events or while advising then Republican Governor Charlie Crist, so I know that they know precisely who they are—and why their words and deeds are racist. While many of this ilk think that they are slick because they "have a Black friend" or have appointed a few Blacks to key positions, I contend that optics and words are not always predictive of racism and racist policies, thus the need for those who see through the morass to call balls and strikes in real time so that the adage, "I don't need to hear what you say when I can see what you do," is fulfilled.
You see, all last year and into this past spring's Florida legislative session, Gov. Desantis pushed for an Orwellian "anti-Riot" Bill that would criminalize the acts of peaceful protesters up to and including the blockage of public roads. Orwellian because in Florida, there were no massive riots or civil unrest last year as organic BLM protests sprang forth across America after George Floyd was murdered on tape by then Officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In fact, the protests here in Tallahassee were as peaceful as one could ask, but that didn't stop one group of whites from trying to plow through protesters with a truck near Florida's Capitol Complex one day, or another white so-called "counter-protester" from drawing his weapon on unarmed BLM protesters a few days later. In both instances, the counter-protesters were later cleared of any wrongdoing under the convenient "fear of great bodily harm or death" ground standing standard, but I continue to wonder how both instances would have played out legally had one or several BLM protesters been armed and opened fire?
We may never know, but what we do know is that Desantis demonized BLM protesters as if they behaved in Florida's Capitol Complex in the same manner that the MAGA Mob did at the U.S. Capitol Complex this past January.
From my perspective, Desantis is damned by his own words about BLM protesters blocking the streets, "Just think about it: you're driving home from work and all of the sudden, you have people out there shutting down a highway. We worked hard to make sure that didn't happen in Florida...they start to do that, there needs to be swift penalties.”
Oh really? Interesting point when considering that just this week, as Cuban American protesters shut down streets and highways in Miami as a show of solidarity with their countrymen fighting to end communist repression in Cuba, Desantis said, "The Cubans are protesting for a righteous cause."
Alas, there it is in real time, a very simple syllogism that proves that Mr. Desantis does not consider cops (mostly white) killing unarmed Black men, women, and children "a righteous cause;" for the troll who says, "well he didn't say that," he sure did if you can read and comprehend, and/or compare and contrast beyond a primary school level.
I grow tired, extremely tired to be honest, of trying to explain what systemic racism is to conservative trolls who run the gamut from knowing full well what racism is but pretending to "hear no evil, see no evil," to the blissfully blind "Know Nothings" who, in homage to the great Sam Cooke, "don't know much about history"—or anything else of substance. You know the ones whose social media profile pics look like they are fresh from the prom scene in Stephen King's horror classic "Carrie” while they ask the only question that they can muster from their limited intellectual arsenal, which is "how's that racist?"
It's racist because 9.9 times out of 10 in America, the color of one's skin is highly determinative of how social, political, and legal policies are implemented and executed. It's racist because the majority of Cubans protesting in Miami right now consider themselves white, while the protesters that drew Desantis's fake outrage and anti-Riot law are Black. Not that either should be criminalized; the Cubans in Miami should shut down I-95, Calle Ocho, and all parts in between to push their righteous cause, as should BLM protesters across America push their righteous cause because such peaceful protests are protected per the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Mr. Desantis's brand of racism in this instance also proves why his quest to eliminate Critical Race Theory, one that analyzes the role of white supremacy in public and legal policy, places him on the wrong side of history. I conclude this because as one who has studied (and still reads) history, law, and public policy, I know what white supremacy looks like from a legislative and judicial perspective in ages past—and the present. I know that the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th Century and the Immigration Act of 1924, were two pieces of legislation that barred immigration from Asia, Sub-Sahara Africa (read—Blackety-Black), and placed severe restrictions on the number of Eastern European Jews and Southern Europeans (read--darker skinned whites) who could immigrate to the United States.
I know that systemic white supremacy can be found in the words of revered jurists like U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, one who wrote in his dissenting opinion in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case that rendered Jim Crow segregation legal, "There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race."
I know that systemic racism was found 16 years after Harlan's pronouncement when then presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton University historian often cited as one of the favorites of Mr. Desantis's idol, former President Donald Trump, declared while running for president in 1912, "In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. We cannot make a homogenous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race…Oriental Coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."
These past examples are critically important because they continue to inform modern day policy not just about excluding immigrants based upon race or religion, but they inform how citizens and immigrants of color (and their allies) are treated by authority figures. Thus the importance of not just calling out the likes of Mr. Desantis to point out when his and their rhetoric is ripe with racist intent, but to further provide them a full accounting from the figurative ghosts of racists past to remind in real time why they, truly, are nothing short of revenant racists in the present age.
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Desantis is vying to secure the Cuban vote for the next election. He has placed himself in a precarious position to decide who is allowed to "peacefully" protest. Exposing his law to be based in racism.
"these people"