Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Under the leadership of its governor, Ron DeSantis, and supported by its Republican legislature, Florida is feverishly working to reestablish the numbing segregationist horror of Jim Crow America. Most Americans believe we left this forever. But DeSantis — governor today, presidential aspirant tomorrow — is the determined force behind Jim Crow 2.0.
Beneath the headlines about DeSantis’ effort to block an advanced placement high school course in African American history, his central motive has been largely lost. What Florida’s governor is trying to do is bring back approaches that constitute the foundation from which all manner of freshly bigoted government policies shall spring.
There are three fundamental things that must be done to soften up a population to accept racist policies. The first is you must separate groups of people as much as possible. If you isolate people from one another, it allows you to assert their differences to stoke resentment and later hate. If people are allowed to mingle with each other, if we see the “other” is actually like us, then people resist efforts to victimize their fellow citizens. So bigots work to limit mingling with the targets of their hatred. This is why apartheid existed in South Africa, why “separate but equal” was the rallying cry of Southern governments for decades, and even why Jews were excluded from country clubs. In ways big and small, when you see efforts to isolate groups from each other, you know the motive is to encourage hatred.
Importantly, an essential piece of isolating people from on another is not allowing the history and reality of other people to be discussed. If you understand someone’s history, you might understand that they are like you, and that is anathema to the bigot’s playbook. This also plays a part in the second essential piece needed for state-sponsored racism.
For a population to accept racism, one must prevent the people who are the target from knowing their history and heritage, because these are core elements of identity. This was why slaveholders broke up families and prevented people of the same tribe from being together. This is why Native American children were taken from their homes and placed in Indian schools where their names, language and history were forbidden, denying them an identity in the process.
The third essential element needed to create a society that will tolerate racism is to deny the oppressed group equal access to that core of democracy: the ballot box.
Once you’ve done these three things, the population is ripe for a return to full-fledged government-sponsored racism. This is Jim Crow 2.0. This appears to be DeSantis’ mission.
His twin attacks on education in Florida — the “Don’t Say Gay” law and the current attack on the AP African American History curriculum — are overt attempts to prevent the discussion of the history, life experiences and humanity of the Black and LGBTQ+ communities. While DeSantis calls the AP course “indoctrination,” he neglects to point out it’s optional for students and thus by definition, cannot be indoctrination. Instead, his goal is to prevent all students from access to the history of Black Americans. In so doing, he wants to ensure that white students know as little as possible about the history of Black people in America, and he wants to prevent Black students from learning the story of their people in this country.
If you prevent someone’s story from being told, you’ve isolated them both from the larger society as well as from their own heritage. We should all know each other’s stories in a just society.
DeSantis wants a population deadened to the appreciation of other people. Because then you can do almost anything to them.
In the third core for a return to Jim Crow, Florida’s governor already is well down the road of blocking access to ballot box. Among his first acts in his first term was to purge voter rolls and work to block a voter-approved measure to allow many convicts the right to vote again, both of which largely affected Black Floridians. Then he created an election police force, another overt attempt to suppress the Black vote. If this continues, Florida in the 2020s will look like Alabama or Mississippi in the 1950s. Tragically, DeSantis would like nothing less than that.
DeSantis has not proposed any convincing curriculum to teach African American history, simply because he doesn’t want it taught at all. Nor has he proposed a way of helping Florida’s substantial LGBTQ+ population to openly participate in all areas of life without fear or harm.
In Florida, news stories speak about gay parents who are already wondering aloud if they can raise their kids in the state. Many are considering leaving. One can only assume many Black Floridians are asking the same question.
In the original Jim Crow South, the laws effectively forced a great migration of Black people from racist Southern states to northern urban areas. The bigots were pleased. Their goal was to drive people out. Ironically, that migration was responsible for a great flourishing of economic growth in the North while the South stagnated economically for decades. Still today, the largest net consumers of federal money are Southern red states, even as their politicians whine about the very federal programs those states rely upon.
The nightmarish prospect of a Jim Crow 2.0 is playing out in Florida today but DeSantis’ ambitions are to bring these policies back nationwide. He does so because he thinks there is a political advantage in this. Too many in the Republican Party are complicit as well, as they’ve been animated by far-right pundits eager to divide us further, because for hate to flourish, we must be divided. Americans deserve better than a return to the bleak old days.
A majority of Nevadans have already expressed their opinion of DeSantis by rejecting recipes for hatred. But the nation is not safe. The stakes of Jim Crow 2.0 are our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.
To hedge this risk, Democrats must cleave to inclusive values, and non-bigoted Republicans must be clear-eyed about the dangerous movement in their midst. They can stop providing aid and comfort to the enemies of just America by demanding the ouster of DeSantis and his ilk or, failing that, leaving the party.
