Racism is Being Normalized in Today's GOP, but it Won't Play for Long

Republican candidates and leaders are facing a changing America

Today, Governor Ron DeSantis — dropping like a stone in the GOP presidential primary polls, on his third or fourth campaign shake-up , and apparently unable to perform even the most basic of human interactions on the campaign — announced that he is suspending Monique H. Worrell, the duly elected State Attorney for Florida’s 9th Judicial Circuit.

This isn’t the first time DeSantis has removed a freely and fairly elected official — sent to serve in office by the will of the people. Almost exactly a year ago, the governor saw fit to suspend Andrew Warren, the State Attorney for Florida’s 13th Judicial Circuit.

Today, though, Ms. Worrell’s removal feels a little different.

After all, just last week, Governor DeSantis spent a considerable amount of time defending Florida’s new public school curriculum, which, in part, teaches that slavery “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The criticism of this absurd idea was swift, loud, and powerful. Even the Vice President quickly took the governor to task:

“I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery,” Harris said to raucous applause. “We will not stop calling out and fighting back against extremist so-called leaders who try to prevent our children from learning our true and full history.”

Aside from a clear, concise truth, this was a terrible indictment of not just the DeSantis campaign, but of DeSantis himself. If you’re running for president and the Vice President is reinventing herself as a fighter at your expense, you’re losing.

But Vice President Harris — and everyone else from the center on over to the left should be aware that this was no slip of the tongue by DeSantis. This wasn’t a gaffe. This is what Ron DeSantis, and, by extension, a large swath of the Republican Party believes, or wants to believe: slavery wasn’t that bad.

And this is what Florida’s new PragerU curriculum, being implemented in our public schools, teaches. The PragerU views of slavery and race are quite purposeful.

Let’s also be fair: DeSantis isn’t the only GOP presidential candidate trying out racist material. This horror show didn’t start with Ron DeSantis. The late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond — an avowed racist who filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Bill among many other heinous racist acts — served in the upper chamber until 2003. Just a few years ago former Congressman Steve King regularly used racist language, and promoted neo-Nazis on Twitter. Today, the senior Senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the press to finally admit that white nationalists are racist.

It’s not just the occasional politician, either. It’s entire policies. Back in Arkansas — the home of my alma mater, home of the school integration pioneering Little Rock Nine, Little Rock Central High — they are trying to do away with desegregation altogether.

Of course, I’d be remiss if we didn’t call out the man who normalized all of it: Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has a long, sickening history of racism. In 1973, the Nixon Justice Department (think about that for a minute) sued the Trump family company for violating the Fair Housing Act. Trump refused to rent to Black tenants. He lied to Black applicants about apartment availability.

In 1989, he took out an ad in the New York Times and other publications, with the screaming headline, “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” It was about the “Central Park Five,” teenagers who had been convicted of a brutal attack, and who — after 13 years in prison — had their convictions overturned thanks to DNA evidence (they were paid $41 million by the City of New York in a settlement). Donald Trump has said, despite the clear evidence that exonerated them, that be believes they’re still guilty. And, it should be noted, one of those exonerated members of the Central Park Five is on his way to becoming an elected member of New York City Council.

In 1992, the Trump Hotel lost a discrimination appeal.

If all of this seems selective, or not quite enough, he did once openly advocate for a White-Versus-Black season of his dumb reality show, “The Apprentice.” He called for a total ban on people of the Muslim faith entering the United States (in answer to this blatant xenophobia, my then-boss, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, tweeted tongue in cheek that we should bar “Donald Trump from entering St. Petersburg until we fully understand the dangerous threat posed by all Trumps.” That tweet got real popular, real fast.)

Here’s the bottom line: our nation in changing faster than most predicted. We are an ever-more diverse nation, with fewer people who look like me (white guys), and racial and ethnic minorities accounting for almost all of our growth as a country.

The unanticipated decline in the country’s white population means that other racial and ethnic groups are responsible for generating overall growth. Nationally, the U.S. grew by 19.5 million people between 2010 and 2019—a growth rate of 6.3%. While the white population declined by a fraction of a percent, Latino or Hispanic, Asian American, and Black populations grew by rates of 20%, 29%, and 8.5%, respectively. The relatively small population of residents identifying as two or more races grew by a healthy 30%, and the smaller Native American population grew by 7.6%.

Unfortunately, for too many people who look like me, that is frightening. And so you’re going to be subjected to a campaign of fear, for at least the next year and a half.

Candidates like DeSantis and Trump won’t pivot away from racism in their campaign platform — it is the campaign platform. They’re hearing from too many scared white Americans who will do whatever they can to resist the inevitable change all around. The alarm bell that should be raised for anyone with sense is coming from the GOP fringes. It’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for a “national divorce,” suggestive of a second civil war. How long before these kinds of ideas become mainstream within the GOP?

In the relative short-term, all of it is a losing strategy, of course. I only just heard DeSantis mention his economic plan the other day. This, too, is an indicator of how unserious these candidates are about governing. They’re not interested in running a country which is — or should be — constantly striving to be ever-more inclusive.

I don’t imagine Ron DeSantis is going to last much longer in this Republican Primary campaign. When his presidential campaign finally tanks, I hope his rotten, racist ideas follow with him.