Denée Benton speaks onstage during The 76th Annual Tony Awards at United Palace Theater on June 11, 2023, in New York City. | Source: Theo Wargo / Getty
So, I don’t mean to alarm anyone—and I really hope you’re all sitting down as I would hate for any of you to fall out from shock and hurt yourselves—but it appears there are Black people who believe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a white supremacist.
Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine why anyone thinks the good governor who has gone to war against non-white-people-approved Black history and moved to redistrict his state’s congressional map explicitly to dilute Black voting power is a white power advocate. It must be some kind of evil critical race theory hypnosis that has Black people likening the guy who has led the campaign to weaponize and propagandize the word “woke”—a term derived from African American vernacular—to a Ku Klux Klan leader. I mean, sure, DeSantis once appointed a KKK cosplayer to be a county board commissioner, and a bunch of swastika-waving, racial slur-slinging literal white supremacists recently demonstrated outside Disney World while praising DeSantis as their motivator-in-chief—but that’s no reason to consider DeSantis to be the second coming of Klan Jesus, who has returned to turn water into white supremacy, is it?
So, somebody should certainly whitesplain to Broadway actor Denée Benton that she was completely out of line when she referred to DeSantis as the “grand wizard” of Florida at the 2023 Tony Awards.
Benton made the remark while presenting a Tony award to Jason Zembuch-Young, a teacher in Plantation, Florida. Since any city named “Plantation” is going to feel about as inviting to Black people as a Trump rally-slash-potato salad with raisins contest, Benton sarcastically suggested that DeSantis would move to change the name as soon as possible.
“While I’m certain that the current Grand Wizard—I’m sorry, excuse me—governor of my home state of Florida…I’m sure he will be changing the name of this following town immediately,” the Orlando native said.
Now, listen, I’m sure Benton sincerely misspoke when a slip of the tongue caused her to say “Grand Wizard” instead of “governor.” Still, one simply doesn’t say such things, whether intentionally or accidentally, about the leader of a state whose totally-non-white supremacist resume includes arbitrarily keeping felons in Florida from voting, pushing for a law that protects drivers who hit Black Lives Matter protesters, rejecting math textbooks he claims include CRT, proposing multiple bills to ban CRT into “woke” oblivion, banning any teachings that cause white people “discomfort,” defending white racism against Black people, and perpetuating Donald Trump’s “big lie” by implementing a voter fraud task force that resulted in the arrests of mainly Black people who didn’t know they were ineligible.
Seriously, what’s so Klan-ish about all of that?
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