Florida NAACP tells black people to stay out of Florida, and it’s a really bad idea
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
Did you hear about the Florida organization that is telling black people to stay out of the state?
The Florida conference of the NAACP voted unanimously in favor of a travel advisory, urging African Americans not to travel to Florida. This is, in effect, a recommendation to the national board of the NAACP, which will vote on the proposal next month.
DEMOCRATS RELEASE 500 PAGES OF NEGATIVE INFORMATION ON DESANTIS AHEAD OF 2024 FIGHT
There’s plenty to debate regarding Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) record. DeSantis supported and signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which seems to be a blunt central-government tool for weeding out critical race theory. DeSantis also pushed the College Board to strip Marxist-inspired critical race theory elements out of its AP African American Studies course.
But political debate evidently is not what Florida’s NAACP wants to do. Democracy is kind of passe.
A local branch president said the state has reached “a tipping point,” implying that actual politics and democracy cannot solve the organization’s disagreements with DeSantis.
“We encouraged more people to vote and that didn’t work,” Yahoo News quoted Hillsborough County Branch President Yvette Lewis as saying, “because [extremist Republicans] gained more power and this is where we’re at. We had to take a strong stand because it has gone too far.”
By objective standards, Florida is a pretty good place to be black. This is the implication of the black population of Florida growing under DeSantis’s governorship. In the schools, the black-white achievement gap in learning is lower in Florida than it is in New York, Massachusetts, or California. Florida also has a lower rate of black incarceration than California, Delaware, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. Racial income and poverty gaps in Florida do exist, but they are roughly average.
By telling black people to stay out of Florida, the Florida NAACP is not trying to improve the state. It is not trying to protect black people, either. Rather, it is doing what almost every other institution in the United States does these days: declare itself a nakedly partisan organization, willing to fritter away the credibility it had gained over the years by actually advocating a specific cause.
That’s a bad thing.