The bigot who called me a ‘diversity hire’ has found a new hero: Ron DeSantis | Opinion

I had been a columnist at a paper in Central Florida for a few months when I got a two-page email from a reader angry at a column I wrote about race.

There were comments written that I cannot reprint, but one stood out. The reader, a man, accused my former employer of hiring me to fill some imaginary diversity quota. I was a young woman who had just been hired for a leadership job once occupied by a veteran male journalist. I’m an immigrant from Brazil who, despite being in this country for almost 17 years, still speaks with an accent. In Miami, that’s every other person, but in Brevard County it’s still unusual. God knows what the reader would’ve said if I were a person of color on top of being a foreign woman.

That was almost six years ago. Few people knew who then-U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis was or what the acronym DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — meant.

Today, DeSantis has found the power of turning those three letters into a boogeyman. He has made eliminating DEI initiatives in public universities and colleges his mission in 2023. Closing a diversity office is among the marching orders at New College, the liberal arts school in Sarasota that’s just gone through a hostile takeover by DeSantis’ appointees.

When he rallies against diversity, DeSantis is speaking to the man who wrote that email. The fight against DEI dresses racism, misogyny or homophobia in a righteous robe.

Rabid, angry bigots like that reader were already in DeSantis’ camp even before they knew who he was. Given the governor’s landslide reelection, I assume that DeSantis appeals to something more complex.

What DeSantis has done so skillfully is capitalize on white people’s frustration with PC culture and policing. You don’t have to be a conservative — and DeSantis got support from some Democratic voters — to feel like you’re walking on egg shells, that the smallest transgression will get you chastised or accused of being an oppressor. There’s a grain of truth in DeSantis’ attacks on what he calls “woke” culture, which can be as unbending and judgmental as the systems it vows to dismantle.

That grain of truth is what has allowed DeSantis to act as if he’s defending Florida against some perceived evil imposed by hiring and college admission practices that take someone’s gender, race or background into consideration. Whether his supporters are simply being duped, are willing conspirators in the hateful policies he’s promoting, simply don’t care or aren’t paying enough attention, it all still mystifies me.

It’s scary to think that the more than 4.5 million people who voted for DeSantis last year agree with what he has done in the name of fighting “wokeness.” He’s dismantled Black congressional districts. He’s censored school teachers and university professors on what they can say about race, gender and sexual orientation. His policies prompted the Miami-Dade County School Board to reject LGBTQ history month last year and teachers in Manatee County to cover classroom books out of fear of violating Florida’s new schoolbook law.

If conservatives accuse woke culture of indoctrination, their response is even more inflexible because it uses the power of state government to quash different points of view. In DeSantis’ Florida, you’re either with him on topics of race and gender or you get the heck out, much like I was told repeatedly in Brevard County to “go back to your country.”

Take the state’s rejection of a high-school Advanced Placement African American Studies course and the governor’s outrage over its inclusion of Black queer theory. The revised course content excludes references to that topic as well as the Black Lives Matter movement and reparations. These issues are lighting rods for conservatives, though course creators say political pressure had nothing to do with the changes.

Why is the governor the authority on how to discuss the experience of Black people, and not Black people themselves, or on whether DEI practices are effective?

DeSantis isn’t simply speaking on behalf of Floridians fed up with so-called woke excesses. He and his allies in the Florida Legislature are playing a different game. Their game is to control the narrative about minorities in a way that makes white people feel comfortable and not challenged, sifted through an ideological colander. And DEI, queer and Black studies make them feel uncomfortable and challenged.

I don’t know what’s in DeSantis’ heart. I don’t know how he views women, gay and trans people or African Americans. But I know the result of his policies: Lives, experience and culture of these groups are diminished and, worse, demonized — fair game for bigots like the guy who emailed me six years ago.

You can dress that up in whatever code word you like — diversity quotas, DEI, woke culture — but the result is pure hatred.