Meanwhile in Florida
DeSantis is evil, and not as stupid as Trump.
Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.
He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.
There was jubilation when he was elected.
“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”
In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.
Why? Because DeSantis carefully gerrymandered his district to make sure that he would lose.
It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.
In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud, and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.
Nice guy.
I get so sick of people who claim that things like this don’t happen anymore. Maybe not in their gated community, or their polystyrene bubble…
A former friend actually wrote recently that “systemic racism does not exist”.
I’m sure that former friend wouldn’t see the expulsion of the two black Tennessee House Representatives (but not the white rep) as systemic racism either. Totally different thing altogether.
I’m not persuaded that the white rep’s non-expulsion was racially motivated but race was definitely one factor for the other two.
#2James Garnett. There was someone commenting here fairly recently who regularly pretends the same. In his case, it appears to be due largely to the libertarian ideology he espouses, but there is, I suspect, a large portion of complacency in his views – the kind of complacency that your former friend clearly suffers from and that derives from a desire not to look, not to know, because it would be too uncomfortable.
From the Guardian:
(headline, and sub-headlines)
Britain ‘not close to being a racially just society’, finds two-year research project
Exclusive: More than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced racially motivated assault, data shows
Social barriers faced by Roma, Gypsies and Travellers laid bare in equality survey
(And a paragraph from the article)
“The research, published in a book ‘Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis’ this week, offers the most up-to-date and detailed evidence on ethnic inequalities in the UK, including what its authors say is unprecedented insight into the experiences of Gypsy, Traveller, Roma and Jewish people.”
…and we see the same breathless content about the gender goblins from that very paper. How much is DEI shit and how much is real? The waters have become quite muddy.
I’m going to assume that the UK isn’t a racially just society based on my priors though.
Blood Knight#7. I think it is possible for most intelligent and reasonably well-informed people to make distinctions, and not to assume that if one disagrees strongly and for good reason with the position a news outlet takes on one subject that everything else it publishes is questionable.
Nick Cohen, whom Ophelia mentioned the other day in connexion with Elon Musk’s infantile activities, has published on his website an article describing how the Conservative Party is copying the Republican Party’s tactics in devising ways of making it difficult for people to vote:
Nick Cohen from Writing from London
How voter suppression came to England