During the 2018 gubernatorial race, then-candidate Ron DeSantis told Fox News Floridians shouldn’t “monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda” and electing Black Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum. It’s hard to believe the Ivy League-educated DeSantis didn’t understand the racially charged context of his statement, but, faced with national backlash, he said at the time that his comment had “zero to do with race.”
Maybe that was a slip of the tongue for a politician then just getting used to national attention. After getting elected, DeSantis appeared to offer Black Floridians an olive branch by approving a long overdue posthumous pardon for the Groveland Four, Black men wrongly accused of raping a white woman in 1949.
If there was any effort on DeSantis’ part to quell fears that his governorship would be a continuation of Donald Trump’s white-resentment politics, that is no longer the case. Over the past year, DeSantis has, with seemingly no hesitation, used African Americans as scapegoats in his quest to become the next standard-bearer for Trumpism.
