From Ron DeSantis to Memphis, it’s an all-purpose smear.
From Ron DeSantis to Memphis, it’s an all-purpose smear.
I t’s a struggle to remain shocked by things that are outrageous but inevitable and routine in our political culture — yet it’s still worth the effort.
Falling firmly in that category are the reflexive smears against Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a “white supremacist” for the offense of rejecting a pilot AP course in African-American studies as originally written.
Everyone on the right knows that these kinds of attacks are the price of doing business, and DeSantis must have realized that they’d be lodged against him early and often. This doesn’t make them any less poisonous or deranged, though.
If it is taken remotely seriously, the charge against DeSantis in the curriculum controversy is a libel, an attack not just on his political beliefs and priorities but his character and his status as a Christian believer.
The civility cops who purport to police our discourse should be whistling down this calumny as clearly out of bounds and worse than, say, any of the attack ads aired against Nancy Pelosi. Instead, it is tolerated by polite society as part of the debate and, worse, accepted as having some force and legitimacy.
According to the National Urban League, “Gov. DeSantis Has Charted A Course To The White House That Cuts Straight Through The Swamp Of White Supremacy.”
Given the governor’s support for the Everglades, it might have been more apt to say that his path cuts through “the subtropical wilderness” of white supremacy, but the wordsmiths at the Urban League can be forgiven for not carefully thinking through their rote defamation of conservative politicians and policies.
A column in the Boston Globe maintained, “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to ban an African American studies course from Florida schools carries the stench of white slaveowners who fought to keep those they enslaved from learning to read and write English.”
Yes, it’s all but impossible to tell the difference between DeSantis, the governor of a state with high-quality public schools and extensive measures to allow the parents of poor children to choose their school, and, say, Hugh Auld.
“Crucial to sustaining white supremacy,” the column continued, “is the erasure not only of Black trauma inflicted by systemic and institutional racism but Black accomplishment, triumph, and contributions.”
As with so much of this sort of commentary, there is no effort to show how Florida is erasing black trauma or black accomplishment, besides rejecting a version of a pilot course that isn’t yet permanently part of the curriculum anywhere in the United States.
No worries — DeSantis is still deemed “white supremacy’s helicopter parent.”
Jennifer Rubin, not to be outdone by anyone hurling tendentious charges born of motivated reasoning and partisan malice, wrote that DeSantis has now “gone full-blown white supremacist.”
This is a smear-within-a-smear because nestled within it is the idea that DeSantis already must have been “partially” white supremacist before embracing his inner Lester Maddox by demanding revisions to an AP course.
It is also among the DeSantis administration’s “most explicitly racist actions.”
The use of “white supremacy” in this context stretches the already-flexible term to a new level of meaninglessness.
If it can refer both to the Dred Scott decision and Florida’s decision to reject an AP course as currently written, refer both to the idea that blacks have no rights that the white man is bound to respect and the idea that maybe a curriculum covering Black Queer Studies doesn’t belong in a public high school — well, then, it might as well refer to nothing.
The phrase long ago became woke jabberwocky.
If there were any doubt about that, the instant attempt to blame the brutal treatment of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black cops on “white supremacy” should remove it.
The argument here, if you can call it that, is not particularly intuitive:
“How is it racist if the officers that killed Tyre Nichols are Black?!”
“This is about police culture. Nothing else.”
I hope this short explanation helps. #JusticeForTyreNichols pic.twitter.com/ZddmvBliQn
— Kelechi (@kelechnekoff) January 28, 2023
In fact, we need the politicized African-American studies course to explain how this works:
If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-Blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.
— Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) January 28, 2023
Of course, the strict meaning of the phrase has never been the point; it is the use that can be made of it as a tool of political and social intimidation and manipulation.
That this is an ingrained part of our political debate doesn’t make it any less disgraceful.