On Saturday, three Black lives were stolen in Jacksonville, Florida, at a dollar store just blocks away from Edward Waters University, a historically Black university. Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr, 19; Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29; and Angela Michelle Carr, 52, were assassinated by a 21-year-old white supremacist who “hated Black people”, in the words of the local sheriff.
This intentional murder – like the many which came before it – was not only experienced by those whose lives were stolen and their families, but by every Black person in America. This murder and those like it are a constant reminder that Black people are nowhere safe. It is reminder that our presence, our absence, our movement, our stillness, our attempts to enjoy basic citizenship or complete the routine duties of human life – like grocery shopping – are liable to result in our death.
This reality is not the consequence of one white supremacist in Jacksonville, however. It is the culmination of a dog-whistle politics hellbent on using public policy, social disorder and white racial grievance to terrorize, subordinate and eliminate Black people from public and political life.
Though he was not on hand for the murders, Governor Ron DeSantis and his innovative anti-Black dog whistles should be understood as unindicted co-conspirators. Throughout his tenure as governor, DeSantis has successfully attempted to criminalize or eradicate the rights and experiences of Black folks, sowing fear and stigmatizing the community as criminal, dangerous and unworthy of citizenship.
DeSantis’s penchant for anti-Blackness first most explicitly announced itself in the 2018 gubernatorial election. DeSantis was running against an African American Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum. DeSantis warned voters not to “monkey this up” by voting in “a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state”. DeSantis denied intending the racialized implications of the phrase. Yet, only months later, a robocall targeted Gillum as a “monkey” and “Negro”.
The call stated: “Well hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I’ll be askin’ you to make me governor of this here state of Florida … My state opponent, who done call me monkey, is doin’ a lot of hollerin’ about how ’spensive my plans for healthcare be.” DeSantis condemned the robocall, whose provenance was never determined, and then went on to become the governor of Florida, despite trailing in the polls for most of the fall.
DeSantis was elected with 4,076,186, or 49.6% of the vote, just 0.4 points more than Gillum. However, both candidates were dwarfed by the winning tally of amendment 4, which passed with almost 65% of the vote (a bit more than 1m votes than DeSantis). Amendment 4 was monumental not only because it was a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights for felons – aside from murderers and sex offenders – but because it was meant to undo the white supremacist poll tax first instituted to keep Black people from voting during Jim Crow.
DeSantis gutted the law – with a federal judge calling his intervention an “unconstitutional pay-to-vote system” – and instituted an elections police force that would go on to arrest older Black people for voting and criminalize honest misunderstandings of the law.
DeSantis would later up the ante, demanding that state legislators abandon their own redistricting maps in favor of his proposed gerrymander, which effectively eliminated Representative Al Lawson’s seat and doomed the Black congressman’s re-election bid.
In 2021 DeSantis also proposed and signed a so-called anti-riot bill. This bill – which was passed after the violent, mostly white, January 6 riot at the US Capitol, but was framed as a reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests – criminalized much of what is commonly understood as protected first amendment speech and protest. The bill made petty vandalism of a flag, plaque or painting a second-degree felony punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment. It also created felonious penalties for people who organize protests that happen to turn violent, thereby creating a chilling effect on public criticism of anti-Black police violence.
This was followed, in 2022, by the Stop Woke Act and the separate law that critics call the “don’t say gay” bill. With this legislation, DeSantis banned or sharply limited classroom discussion of gender identity and workplace trainings on race and ethnicity. He also revised Florida’s history curriculum to require, among other things, that students are taught about how some enslaved people benefited from slavery. (He later said that the intent was to teach that they “developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of slavery”.)
It seems that DeSantis would have us believe – and perhaps it is his deeply held belief – that enslavement, subordination and state violence against Black people have long been beneficial to us, and to the various governments of this nation. It is this explicit pattern and practice of affirming anti-Black violence that marks him as partly responsible for this weekend’s violence.
In DeSantis’s America, Blackness and Black people are inherently furtive, rendered both in and outside of law – inside, in so far as we are reachable by the law’s disciplinary arm, but outside, as we are beyond the bounds of constitutional protections.
On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, it is time America finally moves beyond these tactics and ideologies and this willful blindness. Enough blood is enough.
T Anansi Wilson is an associate professor of law and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law
