Three Groups Have Issued Travel Warnings, Advising "Extreme Caution" When In Florida
Also: Marjorie Taylor Greene's racist lies about Jamaal Bowman are nearly identical to words uttered by white supremacists that caused thousands of Black men (and women and children) to be lynched.
On May 20, the NAACP Board of Directors issued a formal travel advisory for the state of Florida.
Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.
The travel warning comes one week after Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law several bills (a) restricting public school educators from teaching Black history in classrooms and (b) banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public colleges.
NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson:
Let me be clear — failing to teach an accurate representation of the horrors and inequalities that Black Americans have faced and continue to face is a disservice to students and a dereliction of duty to all. Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans and in direct conflict with the democratic ideals that our union was founded upon. . . . We’re not backing down, and we encourage our allies to join us in the battle for the soul of our nation.
Chair of the NAACP Board of Directors, Leon Russell:
Once again, hate-inspired state leaders have chosen to put politics over people. Governor Ron DeSantis and the state of Florida have engaged in a blatant war against principles of diversity and inclusion . . . to appeal to a dangerous, extremist minority.
The NAACP is the third organization to warn its members about the danger of th4e simple existence as a Black or LGBTQ person in Florida. The Florida Immigrant Coalition, which includes more than 65 organizations, and Equality Florida, an LGBTQ advocacy group, also have issued warnings.
In April 2023, Equality Florida’s travel advisory “warn[ed] of the risks posed to the health, safety, and freedom of those considering short or long term travel, or relocation to the state”.
The move comes in response to . . . the passage of laws that are hostile to the LGBTQ community, restrict access to reproductive health care, repeal gun safety laws, foment racial prejudice, and attack public education by banning books and censoring curriculum.
Zane McNeill (Truthout) gave a recap of the devolution of Florida due to what historian, author, and longtime activist Barbara Ransby described as “textbook proto-fascist measures”:
Equality Florida warned that the state legislature, working in tandem with Governor Ron DeSantis (R), is currently conducting a broad attack on medical freedom and bodily autonomy, businesses that support LGBTQ people, and LGBTQ participation in art, entertainment and sports.
The travel advisory also warned of GOP lawmakers’ campaign to censor and erase the LGBTQ community through an expansion of the state’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law, which currently prohibits discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity in K-3 public school classrooms, as well as other attacks on academic freedom in the state.
In this year alone, Florida has advanced 10 anti-LGBTQ bills, which would criminalize transgender people who use restrooms or changing facilities of their choice, ban gender marker changes on birth certificates, legalize the “kidnapping” of trans children by their parents, ban anyone under 18 from attending drag performances, and create criminal penalties for medical professionals who provide gender-affirming care for trans youth. A Florida board of medicine rule passed last month also banned gender-affirming care for minors who have not yet begun treatment. . . .
In addition to Florida’s assaults on LGBTQ families, the state has been attacking reproductive justice and immigrant communities, repealing gun safety laws, and fomenting racial prejudice, the advisory warns. . . .
The legislature is currently considering making it more difficult for college students to vote, implementing a 6-week abortion ban, making it a felony for anyone in the state to transport an undocumented immigrant in their vehicle, an prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion projects at public universities.
DeSantis also wants the Florida state government to have the right to take custody of trans children by “legally kidnapping” them from their homes.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition, which is comprised of more than 65 organizations, has also issued a travel advisory, warning that any travel across the state should be done with “extreme caution”.
Due to unconstitutional legislation supported by Governor Ron DeSantis and introduced by Legislative leadership, every county in Florida poses a heightened risk of harassment, possible detainment, and potential family separation based on racial profiling.
This is all part and parcel of what the Republican Party wants to bring to to the rest of the country. In fact, Meatball Ron’s slogan for his soon-to-fail campaign is “Make America Florida”. He’s been trying to act like a normal person, but he clearly can’t do it.
Speaking of vile, odious, unredeemable assholes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who paid $100,000 on Tuesday for Kevin McCarthy’s used lip balm stick, is a white supremacist — and she should give serious thought to wearing her hood (i.e., covering her face) more often. As Salon’s prolific columnist Chauncey DeVega writes:
Marjorie Taylor Greeene is a very dangerous person, a leading member of the Republican Party and larger neofascist movement. Proving that to be true once again, last week Marjorie Taylor Greene summoned up the country’s unique history of white on Black spectacular lynchings and other white supremacist violence in an attempt to gain political leverage, attention and more power.
On Wednesday, Greene and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., were involved in what was by all reasonable accounts an animated and somewhat heated, albeit playful, conversation on the steps of the Capitol after a procedural vote on expelling indicted felon Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from office.
On Thursday, Marjorie Taylor Greene held a press conference where she told bald-faced lies about Bowman’s behavior and her interactions with him the previous day and in the past, as Salon's Tatyana Tandanpolie summarized:
Greene at a Thursday news conference said that she is “very concerned” about the “history of aggression” she claimed Bowman has toward her and other members of Congress. She described her perspective of the altercation, saying that Bowman approached her “yelling, shouting, raising his voice,” which led to the argument.
“He has aggressive — his physical mannerisms are aggressive,” she said, adding, “I think there’s a lot of concern about Jamaal Bowman, and I am concerned about it. I feel threatened by him.”
Greene claimed on Thursday that Bowman accosted her with a “mob” when she traveled to New York to protest Trump's indictment on felony charges of falsifying business records. She said that Bowman cursed at her, “shouted at the top of his lungs” and called her a “white supremacist,” a remark that deeply offended her….
Greene added that she felt “swarmed” and feared for her life.
Greene’s statements are not true. Her life was not threatened or in any way endangered by Rep. Bowman . . .
If Greene felt “threatened” by Bowman that is a manifestation of her own white racist paranoiac thinking for which she should seek counseling or other mental health assistance. . . .
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threatening lies about Rep. Bowman are an example of some of the worst aspects of America’s long history of white supremacist violence against Black men (and Black and brown people more generally) – and white women’s role in instigating (and profiting from) it. Greene’s comments about Bowman were literally as though she was reciting a script from post-civil war Jim and Jane Crow America, with the almost identical words and lies that caused thousands of Black men (and women and children) to be lynched and otherwise terrorized by white people.
Moreover, it would not have been at all surprising if Greene did not summon up some tears on Wednesday outside of the Capitol or during her press conference the next day as she started to howl about how Bowman was a “giant negro” and “predator” who desired her and had violated her “honor.” White women’s tears were and remain some of the most powerful white supremacist weapons of terror and violence against Black and brown people.
If the movies “Birth of a Nation” or “Rosewood” were ever remade, Greene should be cast as one of the main characters. On the call sheet and in the credits her character should be listed as “white woman who lies and gets Black man lynched.” . . .
No one may have sat down with Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was a child or young adult and explicitly told her that “these are words and performance that you as a white woman can use to get a Black person arrested or hurt or worse” (and/or also get yourself out of trouble and get attention and pity by making yourself into a fake victim) but she learned the lessons anyway. . . .
And in an example of the increasingly surreal and absurd ways that white supremacy operates in post-civil rights “colorblind” America and the Age of Trump . . . Marjorie Taylor Greene [said calling her a white supremacist is “equal” to calling a Black person “the N-word”.] . . .
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s words [show] how white supremacy distorts a person’s cognition, perception of reality, morality and ethics. The “n-word” was invented by white people as a way of dehumanizing and demeaning Black people in order to justify slavery, land theft, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, theft, murder, rape, and other acts of oppression and crimes against humanity.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has repeatedly shown herself through her actions and words to be a white supremacist. . . .
In his essential book, “Trouble in Mind Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow”, historian Leon Litwack offers the following insights, which merit being quoted at length, on America’s lynching culture and white racial terrorism against Black Americans:
White fears were based on the assumption that most lynchings stemmed from sexual assault. But in many cases, reports of sexual assault proved entirely baseless, or upon closer examination revealed only that a black male had broken the rules of racial etiquette, had behaved in a manner construed as racial insult, or had violated the bar on consensual interracial sex….
Rape and sexual indiscretion, in actuality, proved to be a relatively minor cause of mob violence….
The offenses that precipitated mob violence related less to sex crimes (as sensationalized in the press) than to physical assault and murder (the most common charge) theft, arson, violations of the racial code, economic competition, and disputes over crop settlements. Many of the transgressions by blacks would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites and were not grounds anywhere else for capital punishment: using disrespectful, insulting, slanderous, boastful, threatening or “incendiary” language; insubordination, impertinence, impudence or improper demeanor (a sarcastic grin, laughing, laughing at the wrong time, a prolonged silence), refusing to take off one’s hat to a white person or to give the right of way (to step aside) when encountering a white on the sidewalk; resisting assault by whites; “being troublesome generally”; disorderly conduct, petty theft, or drunkenness; writing an improper (“insulting”) letter to a white person; paying undue or improper attention to a white female; accusing a white man of writing love letters to a black woman, or living or keeping company with a white woman; turning or refusing to turn state’s evidence, testifying or bringing suit against a white person, or being related to a person accused of a crime and already lynched; political activities union organizing, conjuring or discussing a lynching; gambling or operating a “house of ill fame”; a personal debt, refusing to accept an employment offer; “jumping” a labor contract; vagrancy; refusing to give up one’s farm; conspicuously displaying one’s wealth or property; and (in the eyes of whites) trying to act like a white man.
Litwack continues:
Victims of lynch mobs, more often than not, had challenged or unintentionally violated the prevailing norms of white supremacy. And these range from serious offenses (in the eyes of whites) to the trivial….
All too often, black southerners, innocent of any crime or offense, were victims of lynchings or burnings because they were black and in the wrong place at the wrong time....
Investigators frequently found no easily ascertainable reason for a lynching, except perhaps white emotional and recreational starvation. For some “nigger killing” had simply become a sport, like any other amusement or diversion, and its popularity prompted a Black newspaper in 1911 to call it “The National Pastime”….
Although seldom cited as the reason for mob violence, the assumption persisted that an occasional lynching, for whatever reason, served a useful purpose, that periodically it became necessary to remind a new generation of blacks of their place in southern society.
It would strain all credulity to believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene has read Litwack’s book (or any other serious works of American history). Yet, she is offering a perfect 21st-century reenactment of his descriptions of America's lynching culture. In that way, perhaps Greene is some type of idiot savant in white supremacy and racism. . . .
The America of today is not the same country as it was during Jim and Jane Crow (although the Trumpists and Republican fascists and the larger White Right and MAGAites are desperately trying to recreate it). . . .
America's foundation and its culture are still rotting away from racism and white supremacy and the many forms of social inequality that it nurtures and spreads. In the end, white supremacy, be it in the form of Trumpism or some of other form of neofascism and white racial authoritarianism, will bring the ultimate destruction of American democracy and society. . . .
The following day, DeVega described Greene a “Daughter of the Confederacy” and mused about her love of the Confederate flag:
In a video posted on Twitter last week, Greene bragged about beginning the process to impeach President Biden for non-existent crimes. In that video . . . a cooler adorned with a large Confederate flag sticker can be seen in the background. The Confederate flag is a white supremacist hate symbol that takes on further meaning within the context of Greene’s years-long pattern of white supremacist behavior, speech, and politics. She has spoken at “white nationalist” gatherings and claims to be a defender of supposedly downtrodden white men. She has also spoken proudly about Confederate statues and other monuments. She has shown herself to be an anti-Semite who spouts vile conspiracy theories . . .
In many ways, Greene is a product of the racist culture and white supremacist environment of Forsyth County, Georgia.
DeVega quoted from Kali Holloway’s 2021 essay in The Daily Beast on Greene and Forsyth County. Here is some of that essay:
When Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new congresswoman known for her racist and anti-Semitic rants, was a senior at South Forsyth County High School in 1992, a few dozen Black marchers made their way through the Georgia county’s rain-slicked streets singing old protest songs and carrying signs reading “We Shall Overcome” and “Black and White Together.” The route was flanked by hundreds of snarling white racists waving Confederate flags and shouting ″Go home, n---ers.” . . .
Newspaper accounts describe protesters being pelted with so many “rocks, bottles and mud thrown from a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members and their supporters” that they were forced to abandon the two-and-half mile route. Forsyth County had maintained an unwritten whites-only policy dating to 1912, when white vigilantes lynched a black man and drove out nearly all of the African American residents. The county’s reputation as too dangerous for Black folks to even drive through—a courthouse lawn sign in the 1950s and ‘60s warned “N---er, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You” — was well earned. . . .
Greene’s ideas about Black folks aren’t innovative or creative, they’re just garden-variety, old-school racism. Greene is, of course, a birther who has claimed Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. In a video unearthed this January, she claims that “being in gangs and dealing drugs is what holds” Black and Hispanic men back, concluding “it’s not white people.” She once stated that there are “white people that are as lazy and sorry and probably worse than Black people,” an assessment she probably considers a generous concession. Greene has called Black voters “slaves to the Democratic Party”—racists always love a slavery allusion—and suggested African Americans should be “proud” of monuments to Confederates because they’re supposedly a reminder of how far Black folks have come.
It’s unlikely that Greene’s Forsyth County high school taught her . . . Forsyth County’s history dating to 1829, when the discovery of gold drew thousands of white miners to what was then Cherokee territory. The rapaciousness of those white gold seekers led to the cruel forced removal of Creek and Cherokee people westward along the Trail of Tears. Perhaps her ignorance of this long history of ethnic cleansings—and its connection with America’s larger legacy of white supremacy—explains Greene’s videotaped insistence that “the most mistreated group of people in the United States today are white males.”
But it is nearly impossible that Greene is ignorant about Forsyth County’s more recent racist history. The 1987 civil rights march that made international news just five years before the commemorative protest, itself a big news event, took place during her senior year of high school. . . .
The group of protesters, numbering about 50, could not have anticipated the rage of the racists they encountered, who outnumbered them by scores. . . . (Footage of the march, and there is plenty, shows the white racists being barely restrained by police.) Even [Hosea] Williams, the veteran civil rights organizer, was astonished. “I have never seen such hatred,” he told the Times after the march. “There were youngsters 10 and 12 years old screaming their lungs out, ‘Kill the n---ers.’” . . .
[Two weeks later] Oprah Winfrey brought her new talk show to town, filling the audience with local Forsyth County residents . . . The self-identified head of the Committee to Keep Forsyth County White took his turn at her mic to boast that the angry white mob represented “the largest white people’s protest against communism and race-mixing in the last 30 years.”
Those words hew awful close to a post Greene shared more than 30 years later, which declared, “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”
The mantra of every white racist is that racism is just something that Black folks made up. Naturally, Greene is an adherent of this idea.
“Guess what? Slavery is over,” she stated in one video, rejecting the idea that discrimination is a real problem. “Black people have equal rights.”
“I understand [Blacks] weren’t run out,” one white Forsyth County resident said on national television in 1987, exhibiting the same kind of racist denial. “I understand that they left over a period of time.” . . .
Greene has continued to label Black Lives Matter a “domestic terrorist” organization, and recently signed onto a bill that would ban BLM flags, which she labels “hate America” banners, from being flown atop diplomatic outposts. Greene has been far less critical of the treasonous white supremacist terrorists that she egged on to attack the Capitol in early January during an attempted coup she referred to as a “1776 moment.” . . .
The 1912 lynching of Robert Edwards is finally being acknowledged in Forsyth County with a historical marker that went up in January. On its face, the marker describes the horrific treatment endured by Edwards and the despicable actions of the white crowd that took sick pleasure in carrying out his murder.
“Forsyth County would remain essentially all white until the 1990s,” the plaque states. “No one was held accountable for Edward’s lynching or the racial cleansing that followed. Like all victims of racial terror lynchings Rob Edwards died without due process of law.”
Back to DeVega:
Marjorie Taylor Greene will not reflect upon her love of the South and what it really means in the context of America’s real history. Instead, she will use her Southern fantasies, dreams, fictions, and lies as a weapon in a project of obtaining more white power and ending America's multiracial pluralist democracy. “The South Shall (indeed) Rise Again,” carrying a Confederate flag, wearing a red Trump MAGA hat, and being lifted aloft by the Republican Party.