Global Courant
June already has its monthly celebrations, including Pride, ALS Awareness, and African American Music Appreciation. Let me add one more to the list: It should be National Vigilance Month.
There is, of course, Juneteenth this month, the Monday holiday that celebrates the final liberation of African Americans from slavery. And three summers ago, we had the all-too-brief uprising against racism and police brutality in the wake of a horrific few months of black death. Both came at historic moments when America had a choice to either make collective progress toward racial equality or stay true to its bloody roots.
I’m thinking of something right now a police expert told me when I wrote about Juneteenth three years ago, as the insurgency swelled around the world. Speaking of emancipation, he told me “it took so much blood and so much treasure that the nation was too exhausted to stay focused on what you’re doing to actually build freedom.” He touched on what I feel when I look at America today. People are tired. I know I am.
The truth is that the Republican war on “waking up” is exhausting me. Conservatives have tried to revise the English language and change the meaning of terms such as “critical race theory” to suit their worldview. In that war, their most aggressive campaign may be against the word “wake up,” a term meant to encourage social action and vigilance in a nation rife with hatred of people based simply on who we are. It literally means: stay awake. Racism, and all other intolerance, is not just about dehumanization, discrimination and violence. They are designed to make us tired. If anything, this month should remind us that none of us can afford to be too exhausted to build a better nation.
I saw hints of such exhaustion Pew’s new survey of more than 5,000 Americans. It was released on Wednesday and finds that the 67% overall national support for Black Lives Matter we saw in June 2020 is now down to half. This follows a trend Pew has observed since then September 2020when support began to wane.
The results fall predictably along racial and partisan lines, but the poll places most of the blame on one group in particular. “The decline in general support is primarily due to the declining number of white adults saying they support the movement,” the report reads.
That particular movement is now 10 years old, and yet less than a third said they “extremely” or “very” understand Black Lives Matter’s goals. About the same percentage, only 32%, agreed that BLM is “very effective at highlighting racism against black people.”
Maybe Pew’s poll question might be too specific. By focusing on BLM, it belies the expansive nature of our national introspection following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. That revolt was not so much about the Black Lives Matter organization as it was about the meaning of those three words, and making them a reality in policy. What erupted in response to a murder committed by a cop grew into research into, among other things, racial disparities in medicine made evident by the rising and disproportionate death toll from COVID-19.
Despite the languorous support, these figures may make some optimistic. We have been victims of relentless disinformation campaigns emanating from the political right, from to lie on urban crime rates targeting funding for diversity initiatives. Instead of advocating their policies to voters who are unlikely to support them, the Republicans, led by the disgraced former President Trump, have shown they will simply try to obliterate us. They have criminalized our history, tried to ban books and threatened librarians And teachers. All the while they had the guts to have one negative political campaign against the idea that we should remain vigilant against such actions.
Instead of not doing the racism or, better yet, trying to end it, Republican leaders generally would like us to believe it’s not a problem. Despite all their efforts, half of the respondents still have a positive attitude towards Black Lives Matter.
As fun as that is, I see both this poll and this moment in America differently. Is this the bottom for America’s support for black and brown security and liberation, or are we in danger of sinking further?
Ron DeSantis may have the answer to that question.
The governor of Florida runs against the wind. His burgeoning presidential campaign is not going well. He is nearly doubled in polls by Trump, currently a criminal defendant in two different courts. In addition, the acolytes of said defendant DeSantis are considering Enemy No. 1, seemingly above President Biden. Or even Black Lives Matter. (Maybe that’s going too far.)
It’s early so things can change. Other than surprising developments, however, it’s hard to see DeSantis’ road to the nomination. But I don’t celebrate his sultry campaign. That he has come this far with his policy of malice speaks ill of the course of our nation.
DeSantis presents himself as the more competent version of the former president, but he’s more of a cosplayer than an evolution. Without the veneer of fame, only the cruelty remains.
In addition to prohibit gender-affirming care for trans youth, signing a “bathroom bill”, And criminalize drag performancesDeSantis too feuded with Disney about his discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay” law, which cost Floridians thousands of jobs. He drew a six-week abortion restriction that was extreme even by his party’s standards. He poorly managed Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic so bad it appeared to be on purpose, encouraging residents and visitors alike to flout safety protocols while black and Latino Floridians remained disproportionately affected.
Recently, his government and its contractors defrauded three dozen migrants and flew them to California as fodder to make a cheap political point. For context, DeSantis had just signed four human trafficking bills into law. promising with no apparent sense of hypocrisy “to use all means at our disposal to bankrupt and jail traffickers.” (He himself may be guilty of violating kidnapping laws, as Governor Gavin Newsom hinted the day the second plane landed in Sacramento.)
His accomplice, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, joined DeSantis last year in shipping migrants to both Martha’s Vineyard and Vice President Harris’ Washington residence. Abbott just did it again, ferrying 42 migrants from Texas to Los Angeles for a day-long journey without food or water.
The reckless endangerment of people is what we have come to expect from the Republican administration. It’s no wonder three civil rights organizations recently took the very rare step of issuing travel advisories to anyone in their constituency traveling to Florida.
The LGBTQ+ rights organization Equality Florida was the first, warning “of the risks to the health, safety and liberty of those considering short or long journeys, or relocation to the state.” (The human rights campaign soon joined them.) The League of United Latin American Citizens issued to them in early May warned Latinos ahead of the July 1st enactment of legislation that DeSantis’ office proclaimed was “the strongest state-led anti-illegal immigration law ever enacted.” The warning from the NAACP came days later, shortly before DeSantis announced his presidential campaign. It was, in the words of the organization, a “direct response to (DeSantis’) aggressive efforts to erase black history and curtail diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”
Both the NAACP and LULAC have been around since the early 1900s, and DeSantis triggered only the second such warning either organization has ever issued. This alone should be enough warning, but it isn’t.
Republicans have been campaign and rule with bigotry since long before I was born. It’s been a winning message, but whether it’s for DeSantis doesn’t matter. Instead of his electoral prospects, I think of the damage he has done as governor and can do as a presidential candidate.
What is useful, however, is examining why his electoral prospects are suffering. The Pew numbers represent a nation that viewed civil rights as a summer craze three years ago, but also dislikes being seen as the bad guy. It never does.
America stays that guy WHO never thinks he has commit an offence. This is evident in every excuse the country’s apologists come up with the long list of human rights violations, both here and abroad. So many Americans are content to vote for terrible results, but heaven forbid they ever get associated with those results.
Remember that while the actual racial hatred is spread, the collective view of it is as negative as conservatives reused the word “racism”. to claim that whites are the real victims.
Therefore, it is time for vigilance. DeSantis and his fate may hate that the term “wake up” exists, but people like them are why it exists. DeSantis and company argue that we don’t need that vigilance, comparing it to a virus instead. It’s not just bigotry. They expose the entire American public and they limit the potential of the country itself.
The GOP will continue to do what it does, but what will we voters tolerate? How do we treat candidates who thrive on the kind of brutality and strong talk that DeSantis and others still engage in?
Let’s be stereotypical Californians for a moment and focus on ourselves. Recall that earlier this month our state was where DeSantis and his officials chose to send a group of misguided asylum seekers and dump them in the state capitol in a sick publicity gamble.
Why don’t protesters take to the streets? Why aren’t Americans more conspicuously furious about what DeSantis did? Is it because the anger didn’t seem to matter last time? Like the tumult after a mass shooting, do we only wake up when someone’s life ends? Has the constant, mind-numbing dehumanization of the right somehow made us all less human? Or are we just too tired?
