AMERICAN THINKER - Monica Showalter - FEB 7, 2023
In what looks like a man-bites-dog story, black leaders in Miami have apologized to Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, for calling him "racist." The context was DeSantis's elimination of the AP curriculum on African-American studies, which had devolved into a wokester inferno.
According to Karen Townsend, writing at Hot Air:
On Friday, Pierre Rutledge, chair of the Black Affairs Advisory Board, issued an apology to Governor DeSantis. Days before, a member of the volunteer board called DeSantis “racist” because the governor rejected an African-American history Advanced Placement course. The College Board removed parts of the course last Wednesday that was opposed by DeSantis. The course will be reevaluated by the Florida Department of Education. DeSantis supported the Department of Education’s decision to remove the history course, because he said it pushed a political agenda. “This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory,” DeSantis said. “Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda.”
Anyone reading that can only say 'wow.'
After all, aren't apologies usually the other way around? A black board, with nine members standing behind their leader, apologizing to a white governor for casually flinging the word 'racism' at him signals some kind of change. Racism charges, after all, are flung like confetti these days, and we have seen pretty much everyone opposed to wokesterism accused of racism without apologies. They did it to Trump, they did it to George Bush, they somehow didn't do it to Joe Biden, whose racist statements are quite the flamers, but who kowtows to the racial grievance lobby, and therefore gets away with it, but somehow, they backed off from DeSantis.
Townsend speculates that the apology came as a result of the overuse of the word 'racism,' comparable to crying wolf, leaving real racism issues without credibility.
But I think something else is going on, some kind of velvet hand of power. These wokester characters, generally speaking, are bullies. They know that whites are terrified of being called 'racist' and they use that to exert power. These days, some, such as Trump just ignore them or tell them they are wrong, but polite society remains averse to triggering that charge.
That we saw a backtrack, coming on top of the College Board itself backtracking on the wokester exam, signals some kind of counterpower is being exerted -- the grievance bullies actually seem to fear him.
Hence, the "first" we see here, which is an apology.
Obviously DeSantis, who has soaring poll numbers in Miami, has some kind of referente power over them, sure, but he probably employs some kind of political muscle. That's a guy who knows how to use power. To see one's adversaries scatter like that and try to get back on his good side with an apology is something unusual. They don't want to mess with him. Perhaps he showed them how he deals with wokesters through his acts to punish Disney for its inappropriate wokester politicization, or perhaps he threatened to remove them and place black conservatives on the board. It could have been anything.
But the bottom line here is that we aren't seeing the smogfest of racial narrative-making as we have seen with other conservative politicians who have defied the racial grievance lobby. They backed off from their reflexive claim of racism.
That's change. And obviously, a pretty good signal of DeSantis's capacity for enacting political change without getting racist mud flung all over him. What a governor!