The culture war against “wokeness”, CRT (Critical Race Theory), DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), education, history and freedom led by Republicans in states such as Florida, Texas and Tennessee are as horrendous, wasteful and ridiculous as they are harmful, frightful, draconian and dangerous.
This faux crusade is spearheaded by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who, a short time ago, initiated a call to arms against these non-problematic and non-threatening concepts. His fear-mongering tactics rallied communities and individuals into joining his cause, helping him to affect horrid change across Florida.
School boards across the state have suddenly become whitewashed gladiatorial venues that purged qualified and successful Black candidates from leadership positions with claims of “CRT supporter” and “woke” propaganda.
After DeSantis championed the utterly ridiculous “Stop WOKE Act,” other states have taken up the tiki torch to deter how certain topics pertaining to race can be taught.
Recently he’s strengthened the resolve of his purification crusade by adding educational freedom, Disney, abortion rights and the LGBTQ+ community to his target list.
But at its core, it’s a Jim Crow-infused crusade that specifically targets Black culture, people and history.
Jim Crow 2.0
Jim Crow and its segregationist horrors began its revival during Trump’s rise to power and only grew more powerful during the 2020 election as red states enacted voter restrictions across the country.
This is the mantle that DeSantis has taken up as he intensifies the culture wars that no one outside of him and his followers desires.
That’s why it’s so imperative to understand how Jim Crow works for it’s a gradual effort that creeps slowly and wields devastating effects if remained unchecked.
The Las Vegas Sun wrote an excellent story on how Jim Crow works.
First, wrote the editorial board, groups must be separated and isolated. That reduces any strength in numbers and removes understanding. This way differences can be used as fodder for hate. That’s why apartheid was so effective in South Africa and why “separate but equal” was a rallying cry in the South.
Second, the targets of attacks must be prevented from “knowing their history and heritage, because these are core elements of identity.” This is why slaveholders broke up families and why Native American children were forced into Indigenous residential schools.
Lastly, equal access to voting must be eliminated, for if an oppressed group can’t vote, they can’t effect change. This has been an ongoing effort in states like Georgia, where long lines, reduced voting hours and voting centers are the norm in many Black and Democratic majority areas.
Today, CNN wrote a story on the effort by Republican-controlled legislatures to suppress the voting rights of high school and college students by enacting new restrictive registration and ID laws.
This is a continuation of Republican-led efforts to purge voting rolls and DeSantis’ introduction of his election police force which intimidated Black voters in an attempt to suppress the Black vote.
But his attack on education as a whole, specifically through his censorious higher education bill, Florida HB 999, is extremely dangerous as well.
If passed, it would destroy higher education and the freedom to learn and provide other fascist Republican-led states with a blueprint on how to do the same to their education systems.
The Attack On Education And Thought
According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed, DeSantis first demanded state universities detail their “expenditure of state resources” on “programs and courses related to critical race theory and to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The 12 state public universities reported a combined $34.5 million on DEI programs. In addition, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that none of the universities spent more than 1% of their budget on these programs.
These programs promote acceptance and understanding, which DeSantis is vehemently opposed to. He wants to “ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology.”
That, of course, is hysterically hypocritical as his entire crusade is based on a trendy, ignorant “anti-woke” ideology that supposedly combats an ideology (wokeness) that doesn’t even exist. It goes hand in hand with the stupidly moronic debate over whether a mermaid could be Black.
DeSantis and his ilk needed a rallying cry, so they’ve chosen to focus on CRT, a graduate-level course developed in the 1980s to study race and its place in systems and institutions.
But DeSantis has positioned it as a divisive educational weapon to attack white people. That, of course, is a lie.
He’s effectively weaponized this intellectual asset and banned books deemed to have “woke” or CRT tendencies.
And he’s not alone for others are following and adding on.
In Tennessee, Republican state senators are waging a similar effort to muzzle Black voices and dehumanize Black people.
In North Carolina, House Republicans are reviving their CRT war with House Bill 187, known as the “Equality in Education” bill, which prohibits public schools from promoting ideas like “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”
Down in Texas, Governor Abbott is coming down on public institutions that use DE&I efforts in their hiring practices. The state Senate joined the governor’s oppressive efforts through religion by requiring that the 10 Commandments be displayed in every classroom, effectively ignoring the fact that the country was founded on the separation of church and state and that America is the home of religious freedom.
These efforts will harm students, institutions and the entire education field. Sadly, they’ve already upended the lives and careers of teachers through confusion, stress and the constant fear of being punished or verbally and/or physically attacked by mobs of brainwashed and ignorant people.
“This is something that’s being manufactured by the Republican Party, and it’s going to have real consequences for our children, for our teachers, for our schools at a time when we should be talking about the fact that I think teacher vacancies have tripled in the last three years,” said Democratic State Rep. Vernetta Alston. “There are real crises going on in our schools that need immediate attention. And this is not where we should be spending our energy.”
But that’s the diversion DeSantis has created with his grand mission of silencing Black voices, eradicating Black history, limiting and controlling education and making all acquiesce to his will.
Black history is American history, but it’s one he and his fellow faux crusaders don’t want to be told because of its harsh truths.
His “Freedom From Indoctrination” movement blocked an African American AP program from being taught in Florida’s public high schools. The most current, diluted version is completely devoid of Black scholars, writers and educators who would teach facts and different ways of thinking.
The heartless politician even proposed reversing a law that lets Dreamers pay in-state college and university tuition. That would affect roughly 40,000 undocumented, higher-ed students in the state.
So why the sudden attack on education?
The last thing racist, anti-woke crusaders want is free thinkers with the ability to intelligently and articulately challenge the norm and foster change. So these modern-day fake crusaders rail against independence and free Black minds and teachings. That’s why they removed or downplayed Black feminism and Black Lives Matter subject matter and added “Black conservatism” as a research project idea to the revised AP course.
Britannica defines “indoctrination” as: “to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.”
This is why DeSantis’ “Freedom From Indoctrination” is so hysterically hypocritical.
Most of his followers support the cause blindly, yet most had never even heard of CRT until he positioned it as a weapon of mass destruction. Some still don’t even know what it is or can’t define it. They dislike it simply because he told them to.
His ignorant followers are so blindly seduced and indoctrinated that they’ve attacked children’s books and threatened teachers. Now, these poor educators are scrambling to remove banned books so they won’t be arrested.
Think about that. Arresting teachers over children’s books. It harkens back to Hitler’s attempt to eradicate everything non-Aryan.
Organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU are banding together to fight his movement of oppression in court, and students across the state have taken to demonstrations and class walkouts in protest of his restrictive education mandates.
Yet there is one industry that wields enough power to threaten, damage and derail DeSantis’ crusade.
Sports.
Time To Take The Field
The time has come for professional leagues, teams and athletes, as well as college conferences, institutions, athletic programs and athletes, to stand up against these authoritarian and racist measures.
This especially goes for Black athletes, for they are the prime targets.
Just look at DeSantis’ attack in January on the NHL’s “Pathway to Hockey Summit,” an event meant to help attract diverse talent to the league and sport.
The league’s advertisement called for “applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, including anyone identifying as ‘female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability.’”
Yet DeSantis and his team labeled it a discriminatory event. Hockey, which is overwhelmingly white and male, being accused of discrimination because it wanted to become more diverse reiterates just how nonsensical DeSantis’ crusade is.
Now is the time for athletes, especially Black athletes, to wield their position, platform and power to stand up to DeSantis and his co-conspirators.
They should follow the lead of Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade, who moved from Florida to California as his daughter, Zaya, is transgender and the state’s inhumane policies against the LGBTQ+ community would affect his family.
“My family would not be accepted or feel comfortable there. And so that’s one of the reasons why I don’t live there,” said Wade.
Imagine if Black recruits and players followed in Wade’s footsteps and refused to play for college programs such as Miami, Florida State, UCF, the University of Florida, Texas or Tennessee. Almost two-thirds of each team would be missing, along with NIL revenues.
What if Black players from the Magic and the Heat refused to take the court in Florida? Their games would be forfeit for they would barely be able to field a legal team. Could you imagine the impact of having the Knicks and Heat refusing to play in Miami during the playoffs?
Sundays would never be the same if players from the Dolphins and Jaguars refused to suit up.
These righteous acts of protest would have a crippling effect on every industry and community from the Sunshine State to the Lone Star State.
It’s not unprecedented. Sports organizations and leagues have previously taken powerful stands against oppression, bigotry and ignorance and brought change through them.
In this story, Professor Lou Moore documented the refusal of the Milwaukee Braves, Hank Aaron and MLB to relocate the team to Atlanta until the city dealt with its Jim Crow laws. It took a cooperative effort between the league, civil rights organizations and local businessmen to eliminate the laws before the Braves relocated to the city full-time in 1966.
55 years later, after Georgia resurrected Jim Crow election laws, MLB hit back once again by relocating the 2021 All-Star Game to Colorado. Now, two years later, MLB can once again take a powerful stand against oppression by pulling the 2024 game from Arlington, Texas.
And Baseball is not alone.
In 1991, the NFL denied Arizona the 1993 Super Bowl because of the state’s refusal to accept Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. That cost the city billions. A year later they recognized MLK Day as a federal holiday and they were awarded the Super Bowl in 1996. They should do the same to Florida if the state makes a Super Bowl bid for 2026 and beyond.
The NBA and NCAA should embrace their history and refuse to hold their events in Florida just as they did in North Carolina in 2016. That year both organizations disqualified the state from hosting the All-Star Game and championship events (including March Madness), respectively, after the state passed the dreadful HB2 bill.
That decision reportedly cost the state an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion in economic activity.
Last year, the National Lacrosse League established “Every Child Matters,” an initiative to honor those affected by the horrors of Indigenous residential schools. The league, instead of ignoring or whitewashing this horrific period in history which led to thousands of Indigenous people being killed across North America, unabashedly acknowledged it and educated others about it.
And education, as DeSantis, Abbott and others fear, is power.
Let’s not forget about the brave Black football players at Missouri who threatened to boycott a game in response to the school’s poor handling of a racist incident on campus. When they realized the boycott would have cost them “more than $1 million if the team forfeits a game scheduled for Saturday,” the school quickly responded they would address the issues. These players committed to supporting the cause despite the hate they received and the threat of having their scholarships rescinded if the game was forfeited.
Suppose others in Florida, like the College Football Playoff, Inter Milan CF, the Marlins, Rays, Lightning and the Florida Panthers all joined the effort against the state’s tyrannical, “V for Vendetta” type regime?
Imagine if the Panthers, after upsetting the Bruins in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, refused to take the ice.
Suppose the Mets and Yankees bypassed Port St. Lucie and Tampa and held their spring training in Puerto Rico. Or if the teams worked with Major League Baseball and refused to play games in Florida against the Marlins or Rays.
This is a blueprint that could be applied in other offending states as well.
What if Black football players at the University of Texas, who already protested the school fight song “The Eyes of Texas” and demanded that the athletic department give money to Black Lives Matter organizations, decided not to play? Longhorns football would be devastated.
Suppose Dawn Staley decided not to play against teams in these states or in the NCAA Tournament. What if Angel Reese and her teammates refused to suit up against SEC teams in those states?
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Clemson football taking a stand after George Floyd’s murder.
What if ESPN, who will be shelling out $3 billion over 10 years for the exclusive rights to SEC football, stood up and said/did something about what’s going on in Florida, Texas, Georgia and Tennessee? DeSantis is already attacking its parent company, so maybe it’s time for the company’s cash cow to speak up.
Imagine if MLB put Nashville’s push to attract a franchise on ice for the state’s legislator’s continued attacks on education regarding race.
After all of the success it had in Miami last year, what if F1 pulled its races from Miami and Austin? That would cause almost $350 million in economic impact to disappear from Miami’s local economy.
Those decisions would have a devastating effect on each state’s finances, and what better way to force change than financially?
Ron DeSantis is systematically indoctrinating followers to fight an artificially mastered culture war that exists because people like him created it and perpetuate it daily.
Intelligence, knowledge, thought and a sense of identity are some of the most powerful tools people can possess, and his crusaders fear progressive, diverse, non-white, non-Christian, non-traditional individuals possessing them.
Florida’s governor has taken the field and is off and running. Now it’s time for sports, armed with billions in economic power and followers, to suit up, run him down, stop his tyrannical run and take him, and other leaders that follow him, out of the game.
