Fear and loathing in Florida: The Southern strategy on steroids
30th May 2023 · 0 Comments
Incorporating fear and hate of Blacks to whip the votes of racists has been the GOP strategy for decades.
The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains during a 1981 interview how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘ni**er’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Ni**er, ni**er.’”
Everything old is new again. The Atwater’s Southern Strategy is alive and well, but today’s Republicans have kicked it up a notch. But civil rights organizations are fighting back.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is betting on riding his viral brand of the southern strategy straight into the White House. To that end, he is trying to out-Trump Trump.
DeSantis’ criticism of the College Board’s AP African American History curriculum caused the organization to scrub segments from the framework of the course, his executive orders striking down Florida institutions’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and campaign against the “Woke virus” (he coined that phrase), as well as his support for banning books by Black authors prompted a strong clap back recently from America’s oldest civil rights group.
The Florida Travel Advisory, announced last week by NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson, was the 114-year-old organization’s counterstrike against DeSantis’ presidential campaign strategy to marginalize Blacks’ contributions, challenges, and history and his attacks on the LGBTQ community in the sunshine state and beyond.
The travel advisory is not a travel ban but a warning to the public that the state of Florida is “hostile” to and devalues and marginalizes the contributions of and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.
Most recently, Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which the youngest poet laureate in the U.S. read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, was banned for elementary school children at a Miami-Dade K-8 school based on one parent’s complaint.
Daily Salinas challenged the Gorman poem – which she says she hasn’t read in its entirety – because it contains “indirect hate messages,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.
That’s patently false.
Upon learning about the ban, Gorman responded, “I wrote ‘The Hill We Climb’ so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment.”
In January 2021, before reciting “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration, Gorman told the Washington Post, “My hope is that my poem will represent a moment of unity for our country, that with my words I’ll be able to speak to a new chapter and era for our nation.”
But judge for yourself. Watch Gorman read her poem and read it at www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-20/watch-and-read-amanda-gormans-inauguration-day-poem.
Salinas also petitioned the school to restrict books about Langston Hughes and Black and Cuban history. The Escambia School District decided to ban all but one book about Cuba from grades K-5 while leaving them available to middle school students, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.
Even though middle school students can access the poem, restricted access to any student is still a ban.
Salinas’ Facebook page pushes for bans of books by people of color and includes posts of right-wing ideologies and anti-Semitic memes.
A report on Salinas by Miami Against Fascism (MFA) however, has gone viral. And according to a tweet posted by MAF, “Our exposé on Miami book banner and M4L (Moms for Liberty) + Proud Boy supporter Daily Salinas is now national news. She’s wiped her social media, and reporters are knocking on her door.”
Following DeSantis’ support for rejecting students’ access to an AP African American studies course – a key feature of his so-called “War on Woke,” the NAACP distributed 10,000 books to 25 predominantly Black communities across the state in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers’ Reading Opens the World program.
For the record, the weaponization of the word “woke” by Republicans is part of their demonizing of what is virtuous. Being “woke” means being aware of chicanery, grifters, and others who run the game.
Between July and December 2022, individual book bans occurred in 66 school districts in 21 states, according to PEN America which works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, convey information and ideas, express their views, and access the views, ideas and literature of others.
In April 2023, PEN America recorded 13 districts in Florida banning books, 12 districts in Missouri, seven in Texas, and five in both South Carolina and Michigan.
On May 3, educators and civil rights leaders protested book bans nationwide with teach-ins at university campuses, community book drives, the reading of banned books on social media, and rallies in front of the College Board headquarters in both New York and Washington, D.C.
On May 17, PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, authors, and parents of children affected by the book bans carried out by Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, filed suit in federal court asking for books to be returned to the school library shelves where they belong.
And beginning on Juneteenth, protesters will march through Florida in solidarity against book bans. This 21st Century movement to repress Black history is as viral as whites’ resistance to integration in Sundown Towns in 20th-century America and white slavers’ 19th Century prohibition of the enslaved being taught to read.
Sundown Towns were all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that excluded Blacks and other minorities using discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. Sounds familiar?
“Almost all suburbs were sundown towns,” said Dr. James W. Loewen, the author of “Sundown Towns.”
However, Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” is the best known of his dozen books attacking historical misconceptions. He took high school teachers and textbook publishers to task for distorting American history, particularly the struggle of Black people in the South, by oversimplifying their experience and omitting the ugly parts. More than 800,000 copies have been sold since it was published in 1995.
Loewen, who taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi for a half-century, died in 2021. He is probably turning over in his grave over efforts to stop and silence those who try to teach the truth about the treatment of Black people in America.
Protest marches, teach-ins, podcasts, and calling out racist strategies are all good. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Should civil rights leaders call for a nationwide boycott of states whose lawmakers ban books, support curriculums that exclude Blacks, and laws that punish LGBTQ people?
The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott and other economic boycotts during the modern Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 60s proved that hitting people in their wallets works.
When asked about the prospect of calling for economic boycotts, NUL President and CEO Marc H. Morial said last month, “People who know me, know I don’t sell wolf tickets. But I never telegraph strategies. Everything is on the table.”
This article originally published in the May 29, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
