On Tuesday in the Florida Democratic primary race for Governor, relative unknown Andrew Gillum, a 39-year old African-American, defeated a host of more experienced Democratic candidates to claim the Democratic nomination.
Gillum has been called a Bernie Sanders Democrat, meaning he hails from the progressive left-wing of the Democratic Party. But Gillum rejects that notion, maintaining that he is simply representing the will of his constituents, the people of Florida.
Not twelve hours after Gillum claimed the nomination, his Republican opponent, Representative Ron DeSantis, told Fox News on Wednesday that a “socialist agenda” in Florida would “monkey things up” in the state.
This kind of barely-veiled inflammatory racial language has no place in modern American politics. Likening an African-American person to a monkey is what the Belgians did to the enslaved Congolese 150 years ago, and history does not look kindly on that horrific colonial occupation.
That kind of language is just out of bounds. Period.
But that is the world we are living in under President Trump, where truth is false, false is true, and objective facts don’t exist. It’s like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, except we’re not in Wonderland with Alice and the Mad Hatter, we’re in hell with Trump, the Devil, and the Grim Reaper.
But not everything is so grim. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, a 44-year old African-American, won the Democratic nomination for Governor, becoming the first black woman to be a major party nominee for Governor in America.
Abrams has run on a progressive platform, reflecting the changing demographics of a state that will become majorty-minority within a decade following large influxes of Latin Americans and Asians.
Also on Tuesday, Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, upset mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Kentucky, in a House primary in that southern state.
McGrath’s win reflected the increasing success that women are achieving within the changing face of the Democratic Party, which is becoming younger, more populated by people of color, and more progressive.
It’s easy to see why. America as a whole is becoming more diverse and more progressive, and the Democratic Party is simply changing to reflect that reality.
What’s really exhilarating is that two young African-American Democrats, one of them a woman, have become their party’s nominee for governor in strategically important states in the Deep South.
Whether they will usher in a new Blue Wave of Democrats across the South remains to be seen.
But one thing’s for sure. The South is changing. The Dixieland of your grandfather is becoming the Rainbow Coalition of the future.
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