Join The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and the Florida Poor People's Campaign for a Mass Meeting - The DeSantis Deflection and Deception: We Demand Truth and Justice...Our Lives Depend on It!

The question isn’t whether the College Board’s AP Black History course is “woke” but whether we’re awake enough to call DeSantis’s bluff.

Moral leaders and impacted people should be standing up, speaking out, organizing, and voting because of the way DeSantis' policy decisions have sacrificed the well-being of Floridians, especially the more than 10 million poor and low-wage people, be they Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native, LQBTQIA, or straight.

If you earn the minimum wage of $11 an hour in Florida, you need to work nearly 80 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment. As of 2018, half of Florida’s workforce made less than $15 an hour, and 2.7 million people did not have health insurance. When you disaggregate these statistics by race, Black and Latino people are disproportionately impacted by poverty, lack of health care, and the denial of a living wage. But in raw numbers, more white people are struggling to get by than any other racial group.

Our history also makes clear that you can’t defeat the divide-and-conquer tactics of racism on their own terms. To build a multiracial democracy where everyone can do better, we need to expose the inequality that is ignored in most public fights about race.

When people form moral fusion coalitions and challenge the lies of politicians like DeSantis, we have the power not only to elect new leaders but also to change the debate about what’s at stake in public life.