In the wake of the tragic Jacksonville shooting, floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who has failed to gain any ground on front-runner Donald Trump, now finds himself at odds with the Florida black community.
DeSantis has already raised the ire of crucial African-American voters in Florida with his controversial policies regarding race education in public schools. Now, the Florida Governor is coming under fresh scrutiny after an avowed racist gunman killed three Black people over the weekend at a Jacksonville Dollar General store, an attack the Justice Department is investigating as a hate crime.
The white gunman, identified as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter from neighboring Clay County, had more than 20 pages of writings that expressed open racism toward Black people, found by his parents after the 11-minute rampage, which included Palmeter taking his own life.
“I know for a fact that he did not like Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a news conference to address the shooting. “He made that very clear.”
Florida’s Black community and beyond have been vocally opposed to the DeSantis administration’s focus on wiping out higher education diversity programs, the teaching of institutional racism to public school students, scrutinizing African American history courses, and drawing a redistricting map that erased northern Florida’s only Black-performing congressional seat, which included the city of Jacksonville.
In May, the NAACP even issued a travel advisory for the state of Florida over DeSantis’ “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”
“How much can we allow the governor to keep his foot on our neck and not say anything?” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Miami Democrat who is Black. “This is the result of that stuff. It’s not only the result, but it gives individuals who committed this act a hall pass to make it seem like it’s OK.”
Issues of race and education are part of a broader culture war agenda that has defined DeSantis’ time in office and been a hallmark of his 2024 presidential campaign. The agenda regularly has him at odds with civil rights leaders who say his “war on wokeness” is a thinly veiled attempt to go after people of color and other marginalized communities in the state.
Most recently, DeSantis doubled down in defense of his Department of Education releasing education standards that include the idea that some Black people received some “personal benefit” from slavery.
For weeks, as he was trying to reset his presidential campaign after a slow start, DeSantis insisted that some slaves learned skills like how to become a blacksmith while enslaved. That position earned him a torrent of criticism from people who said the move was just another in a long line of politically motivated slights toward the Black community.
That mistrust between DeSantis and Florida’s Black community was on full display Sunday when the governor faced audible boos at a Jacksonville vigil for the three victims — jeering that continued until Jacksonville City Councilwoman Ju’Coby Pittman, a Black Democrat, asked the crowd to let DeSantis speak.
At the vigil, DeSantis called the gunman a “scumbag.” Jeffrey Rumlin, a Jacksonville pastor who spoke after DeSantis, was more direct.
“At the end of the day, respectfully, governor, he was not a scumbag,” Rumlin said. “He was a racist.”