Denée Benton speaks onstage throughout The 76th Annual Tony Awards at United Palace Theater on June 11, 2023, in New York Metropolis. | Supply: Theo Wargo / Getty
So, I don’t imply to alarm anybody—and I actually hope you’re all sitting down as I might hate for any of you to fall out from shock and harm yourselves—however it seems there are Black individuals who imagine Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a white supremacist.
Sure, I do know, it’s laborious to think about why anybody thinks the nice governor who has gone to warfare in opposition to non-white-people-approved Black historical past and moved to redistrict his state’s congressional map explicitly to dilute Black voting energy is a white energy advocate. It have to be some form of evil essential race concept hypnosis that has Black folks likening the man who has led the marketing campaign to weaponize and propagandize the phrase “woke”—a time period derived from African American vernacular—to a Ku Klux Klan chief. I imply, positive, DeSantis as soon as appointed a KKK cosplayer to be a county board commissioner, and a bunch of swastika-waving, racial slur-slinging literal white supremacists not too long ago demonstrated outdoors Disney World whereas praising DeSantis as their motivator-in-chief—however that’s no motive to think about DeSantis to be the second coming of Klan Jesus, who has returned to show water into white supremacy, is it?
So, any individual ought to actually whitesplain to Broadway actor Denée Benton that she was utterly out of line when she referred to DeSantis because the “grand wizard” of Florida on the 2023 Tony Awards.
Benton made the comment whereas presenting a Tony award to Jason Zembuch-Younger, a trainer in Plantation, Florida. Since any metropolis named “Plantation” goes to really feel about as inviting to Black folks as a Trump rally-slash-potato salad with raisins contest, Benton sarcastically instructed that DeSantis would transfer to alter the identify as quickly as attainable.
“Whereas I’m sure that the present Grand Wizard—I’m sorry, excuse me—governor of my residence state of Florida…I’m positive he will probably be altering the identify of this following city instantly,” the Orlando native stated.
Now, hear, I’m positive Benton sincerely misspoke when a slip of the tongue prompted her to say “Grand Wizard” as a substitute of “governor.” Nonetheless, one merely doesn’t say such issues, whether or not deliberately or by accident, concerning the chief of a state whose totally-non-white supremacist resume consists of arbitrarily holding felons in Florida from voting, pushing for a legislation that protects drivers who hit Black Lives Matter protesters, rejecting math textbooks he claims embody CRT, proposing a number of payments to ban CRT into “woke” oblivion, banning any teachings that trigger white folks “discomfort,” defending white racism in opposition to Black folks and perpetuating Donald Trump’s “huge lie” by implementing a voter fraud activity pressure that resulted within the arrests of primarily Black individuals who didn’t know they had been ineligible.
Severely, what’s so Klan-ish about all of that?
