“In a radio interview, Ron DeSantis dug up a three-year-old post in which Ms. Haley said that the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police should be ‘personal and painful for everyone.’ Mr. DeSantis, who at the time said he was ‘appalled’ by Mr. Floyd’s death, questioned her sentiments, saying ‘Why does that need to be personal and painful for you or me? We had nothing to do with it’” (New York Times).

The implications of DeSantis’s statement hardly require glossing but gave me further insight into why 7 years of study at Yale and Harvard Law made as little a humanistic impression on him as they did on fellow Ivy leaguers Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. DeSantis’s Italian-American background is seldom noted but though he’s from Florida and I’m from the Bronx, we may as well have grown up in the same neighborhood. One way those of us whose forbears arrived in America during the great southern and eastern European migrations of 1890-1920 responded to the Civil Rights movement and demonstrations of the 1950’s and ‘60s was to declare a collective lack of responsibility for the enslavement, segregation, and depredations visited upon Black Americans from 1619 to the present. After all, we did not benefit from the long history of white supremacy and plantation slavery. This was especially easy to believe for descendants of Italian-Americans given their own long history of oppression in Europe and more recent history of exploitation as laboring masses in the mines, factories, and killing floors of early 20^th century America. This, at least, was common currency in the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood where I grew up—which, I later discovered, happened to serve as one of the most successful examples of redlining in New York City.

That Ron DeSantis never grew out of his own early training in misunderstanding and misrepresentation is no mystery to me. Nor do I wonder at his broadly institutional efforts at fostering denial and misrepresentation in the schools and universities of his home state of Florida. The gradually emergent whiteness of the parents and grandparents of DeSantis and millions of other like-minded Americans enabled them to leapfrog beyond Black Americans by becoming full beneficiaries of postwar provisions like the GI Bill of Rights and access to the proliferation of affordable private homes in segregated suburban communities (advantages systematically denied to Black Americans throughout the 1950s and beyond.) Unconscious of, or in denial about, the privileges afforded them and their forbears, DeSantis and company are quick to claim that everything that came to them came because of hard work and their own merit, and that they need feel nothing for those who have allegedly “allowed themselves” to be left behind.