The sugary sand on Santa Rosa Beach is cool below the surface, sweet relief after a 10-minute hot-step from the parking lot with an armload of bulky chairs and a hangry toddler dragging me down. But by the third day of our family vacation, my young boys have settled in with their plastic shovels and left me cracking open a Michelob Ultra before noon. Drinking in the brew and the whooshing azure surf, I’m gobsmacked that this is what passes for adventure travel nowadays.
On 20 May the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, noting a flagrant streak of contempt for and hostility toward Black, ethnic and queer communities; in a news release, the group quoted the state-sanctioned “war on woke” the Republican governor championed in a craven bid for his party’s presidential nomination. The NAACP board chair, Leon Russell, cited Ron DeSantis for “political grandstanding” and courting “a dangerous, extremist minority” – only to have conservatives mock Russell himself for living in Tampa.
