‘History is repeating itself.’ Are DeSantis policies stoking racial divisions?

On a sunny January afternoon, Rev. R.B. Holmes sauntered to the podium on a stage in front of the Florida Capitol.

About 3,000 people looked on as Holmes, the pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Tallahassee’s historically Black neighborhood of Frenchtown, prepared to deliver the benediction at the 2019 inauguration of Florida’s 46th governor, Ron DeSantis. It was a moment that Holmes, then a registered Republican, relished — Black men who attended segregated schools don’t get to close out an inauguration every day.

Now, more than three years later, he says the “good success” which he prayed for appears to have a different meaning for DeSantis.

“When I talk about success, it means that we have to have a sense of unity,” Holmes said. In October 2021, he left the Republican Party and became an independent, a move he says was motivated by the “Trumpism” that had become the GOP’s mantra. “I think it’s divisive politics, I think it’s wrong politics. It’s the politics that don’t unite us.”

As DeSantis campaigns for reelection, Holmes and some other Black Floridians say their home state has regressed under the Republican governor whose policies appear more geared towards capturing a national audience. They point to laws signed by DeSantis — from the “Stop Woke Act” to the anti-riot bill — and his unprecedented control over the redrawing of Florida’s congressional maps as evidence that he’s more concerned about White House aspirations than issues affecting Black communities.

“African Americans all over the state have been complaining that he’s not being very sensitive towards their issues and the issues of people of color,” Democratic Rep. Al Lawson said. “There’s just an impression that he doesn’t feel like he has to do that.”

About 26% of Black Floridians voted for DeSantis in 2018, according to CNN’s exit polls. More recently, a University of North Florida survey published in February found that about 70% of Black Floridians disapproved of DeSantis, while 23% approved. Although roughly five months have elapsed since the poll was administered, Michael Binder, the director of UNF’s public opinion research lab which conducted the survey, said the result “hasn’t changed much.”

“If you look at the policies that were passed and the issues that he’s standing on, it’s not surprising that large majorities of Black Floridians are not supportive of the governor,” Binder said.

Florida has five Black-led congressional districts, four of which have elected Democrats. Lawson helms one of the two set to be eliminated under the congressional map redesigned by DeSantis, who did not respond to a request for comment. Congressional District 5, which encompasses a wide swath of annexed communities stretching along Florida’s northern border, has the second highest percentage of Black Americans in the state. The Florida Supreme Court approved the east-west configuration of the district in 2015, in part to give its Black residents, some of whom are the descendants of enslaved people who either toiled on nearby plantations or migrated to the region, more voting power, said Lawson.

“It was written by the Supreme Court and 63% of the people in the state of Florida voted” to pass the Fair Districts amendments in 2010, Lawson added, referring to the articles that barred legislators from redrawing districts to reduce minority voters’ ability to choose representatives. DeSantis “took none of that into consideration. All he wanted to do was eliminate it.”

The consequences of DeSantis’ reshaping of Florida — in both its congressional districts and ethos — are far from known. But if reducing Black voting power and restricting critical discussions on race are the result, former Sen. Dwight Bullard, who also taught high school social studies for more than a decade, believes Florida’s future might resemble its past.

DeSantis “wants to shape Florida in a particular vision that takes us back to a time when violence against Black people not only was justified but openly accepted,” said Bullard.

‘He showed us who he was.’

Some of DeSantis’ policies are reminiscent of the Southern strategy that Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to most recently Donald Trump have wielded, according to Patrick Mason, chair of Florida State University’s African American Studies department.

“It’s the conservative strategy of maximizing the white vote by finding things that white voters feel aggrieved about and then attacking those things, either real or imagined,” Mason said.

First employed by Barry Goldwater in 1964 amid the Civil Rights Movement, the concept capitalized on the racial anxiety of white, Southern Democrats, many of whom became Republicans. The late Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater once described the strategy as basically a recruiting tool that utilized dog whistles to mask racial epithets.

“By 1968 you can’t say ‘n-----’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater said in a 1981 interview. “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 ‘N-----, n-----.’”

Key to the strategy’s success is employing people or policies that guard the user from accusations of racism, something Camara Williams, an Orlando-based lawyer and political strategist, said DeSantis has done quite well. For example, DeSantis has appointed several Black judges, approved giving $20 million to Florida’s historically Black colleges and universities and posthumously pardoned the Groveland Four, young Black men falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl in 1949.

“These are shields against his intentions,” Williams said.

Holmes differs with that assessment, saying those actions show DeSantis isn’t racist.

Some of “his policies put him in the corner of being a far right governor,” Holmes said. “I really don’t believe that’s who he is. I think that the political climate that we’re living in has pushed him to right for the future.”

Nixon, whose 1971 conversation with Reagan revealed both presidents’ prejudices, used the phrase “law and order” to court white voters tired of Black Americans’ civil rights protests during his 1968 campaign.

In a 2018 interview with the Tampa Bay Times, the future governor framed his opposition to Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote for more than 1 million Floridians with felony convictions, as being “tough on crime.” Less than a year after nearly 65% of Floridians voted to reverse the Jim Crow-era legislation, DeSantis signed a law requiring formerly incarcerated individuals to pay off any outstanding court fees or fines before voting. Mason said this tactic has been used to limit Black voting power since the 19th century.

“You had these states where African Americans were a high percentage of the population and so they wanted to find a way to limit voting power,” Mason said. “One way to do so was if you had a criminal record.”

Following Black Lives Matter protests that engulfed the summer of 2020, despite the majority of Florida’s demonstrations being nonviolent, DeSantis advocated for the “anti-rioting” law that criminalized blocking traffic during peaceful protests. When DeSantis was asked about Cuban Americans who took over Miami roadways to protest conditions in Cuba in July 2021, he shifted the conversation to the demonstrations in Cuba which are “not necessarily designed to be peaceful” because that’s a revolt.

A federal judge blocked the bill in September 2021 due its encouragement of “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”

“You made the argument that all these outbursts and all these protests around the murder of all these Black people justified the necessity of having this bill yet and still, when people of a different hue decide to protest in the exact form and fashion that you said was unjustified, there was complete silence,” said Bullard, who now serves as the senior political director of Florida Rising, a voting rights organization focused on empowering Black and brown communities.

Reagan invoked the image of the “welfare queen,” which he described as a Black woman with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and an income of $150,000. Once elected, Reagan would link rising crime to the increased spending on social programs to justify gutting its budgets.

“Under Reagan, that party became more aggressively hostile towards African Americans because its strategy for winning was simple: maximize the white vote, ignore everybody else,” Mason said.

Slight strategy shift

The Southern strategy slightly shifted under Reagan who forged close ties with the evangelistic right and ushered in an ideological rebirth within the GOP. White evangelicals’ issues became the party’s issues as conservative candidates championed more traditional gender roles, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ rights.

“It was a backlash to the liberal Democratic Party of the 1960s, 1970s when government would tell you what you should do, what you shouldn’t do,” said J. Edwin Benton, a political science professor at the University of South Florida.

Reagan turning Martin Luther King Jr. Day into a national holiday allowed the 40th president to present his policies as “colorblind,” Mason said. “He signed it then tried to reinterpret King from being who he really is.”

DeSantis adopted a similar “colorblind” rhetoric to justify his congressional maps. In January, DeSantis got involved in the redistricting process — a first in the state of Florida — and proposed a map that he said was “race neutral.” The Republican governor’s congressional map gave his party a 20-8 edge over Democrats. At a bill-signing press conference in April, he justified eliminating congressional district 5 by saying it “divvies up people based on the color of their skin.”

After hearing DeSantis use “race neutral” in reference to redistricting, Williams said he knew the governor was “doing everything he can to limit Black participation.”

“The default position of ‘race neutral’ is always white men, especially when you look at politics,” Williams said. “How can you say you want things more ‘race neutral’ when Black representation is already at a diminished value in this state?”

DeSantis also invoked King’s memory when introducing the proposal that would become the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which further banned critical race theory from classrooms, workplaces and ultimately limits what can be taught about race.

“You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,” DeSantis said in December 2021. “You listen to some of these people nowadays, they don’t talk about that.”

Yvette Lewis, the president of the Hillsborough County NAACP branch, noted that DeSantis’ reading of King was very selective and that teaching history is not equivalent to inciting hate. “It teaches understanding of how Black people got to America and why white people felt” they could enslave and discriminate, she said.

Similar to Reagan, DeSantis has championed issues linked to white evangelicals, including the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and Florida’s 15-week abortion ban. Although a judge temporarily blocked Florida’s abortion ban in late June, the governor’s administration challenged the ruling, and the new law is in effect while the legal process plays out.

Compared with his predecessors, Trump chose a more overt approach to the Southern strategy, stoking fears about the browning of America that had been building since Barack Obama was elected the first Black president. Trump claimed Obama wasn’t born in the United States, blasted professional athletes who knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, banned visitors from majority Muslim countries and supported Confederate monuments. This use of division led to Florida’s current political climate, said Benton.

“Floridians of all ages are more and more conservative than were their counterparts two, three, four decades ago,” Benton, a Florida politics expert, added. “So what the Republican Party has been able to capitalize on was their extreme conservative views.”

That extreme brand of conservatism has come at the expense of Black Floridians, says State Rep. Angela Nixon, a Duval Democrat.

“He showed us who he was when he was running for governor with his ‘monkey this up’ comment,” she said, referring to DeSantis’ comments aimed at his 2018 Democratic gubernatorial opponent Andrew Gillum, who is Black. A freshman legislator, Nixon described her experience as “traumatic” due to being shunned by some of her Republican colleagues for refusing to kowtow to DeSantis.

“Instead of ostracizing the real bad guy who is actually racist, they ostracized us,” Nixon added.

Trump and DeSantis

Nixon and other Black Floridians saw many similarities between Trump and DeSantis. They both managed to create a cult-like following within the GOP, where Republican legislators seemingly support their every move. For Democrat state Sen. Shevrin Jones, that type of blind following shows “checks and a balances has gone out the window.”

“You have a governor who challenges the court systems when it doesn’t go his way or he attacks the courts — same thing Trump did — when things don’t go his way,” Jones said.

Trump has promoted unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in 2020, while DeSantis hasn’t pushed back on those allegations and initially praised the way Florida handled the election.

“The way Florida did it, I think inspires confidence, I think that’s how elections should be run,” DeSantis said in November 2020.

By May 2021, DeSantis had signed a bill designed to “safeguard the sanctity of Florida elections,” according to the governor’s office. This law added hurdles to requesting mail-in ballots, limited the ballot drop box hours and altered “no-solicitation zone” rules to ban “any activity with the intent to influence or effect of influencing a voter” — all things that a federal judge found discriminated against Black voters in March.

The state sought to reverse the ruling and in May, a federal appeals court panel temporarily reinstated parts of the voting law. Amid the battles over the voting bill’s constitutionality, another bill that established a police force dedicated to preventing election crimes became law.

“I don’t think there’s any other place in the country where you should have more confidence that your vote counts than in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said as he signed the measure in late April.

With nearly every DeSantis move making national headlines, Robin Brooks, a Miami native and professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Africana Studies department, said she was concerned about legislation on university professors’ accountability because of conservatives’ growing obsession with higher education.

“History is repeating itself,” Brooks said. “Rolling back rights that we’ve won? That is what authoritarian leaders do.”