Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday signed a law prohibiting local governments from funding or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, saying that white men have been discriminated against.
The Florida governor has been at the forefront of combatting DEI initiatives, despite criticism from groups nationwide. Under the new law, residents can sue local governments for violations and if individual local officials are found to have funded DEI initiatives, they can be removed from office.
“We are, of course, the state where woke goes to die,” DeSantis said during a press conference announcing and signing the two new laws in the state.
The law is a further effort to challenge local counties’ goals to promote race and gender inclusion programs. Supporters of DEI initiatives say that they help remedy the effects of long-term and historical discrimination of certain groups.
While the governor is entitled to his opinion, his views differ from “everyone else’s”, said Evelyn Foxx, president of the NAACP branch in Gainesville, in an interview with the Associated Press.
“If you talked to 100 white men, they wouldn’t feel the same way” as DeSantis, Foxx said. “The governor is out of touch with people, and that is the bottom line.”
During the press conference, DeSantis also called DEI an “ideological construct” to the detriment of “disfavored groups”.
“The disfavored groups, No 1, obviously, would be white males, and I think they’ve been discriminated against,” DeSantis said. “And it’s, it’s like, a lot of people are: ‘Oh that’s fine. That’s fine.’ No, it’s not fine. It’s wrong.”
During the press conference, DeSantis said that Asian American students had also been discriminated against by DEI initiatives.
The new laws follow others signed by the Republican governor targeting DEI initiatives: in 2023, DeSantis signed a bill into law barring public colleges and universities from spending money on DEI initiatives.
DeSantis also signed a law on Wednesday that prohibited climate change-related initiatives, including a bar on businesses having to pay carbon taxes.
“We see some of the things still being done in local governments,” DeSantis said, pointing to some counties in the state pushing for climate sustainability plans and calling them “radical climate policies”.
“We’re just going to stop the madness here, and that’s what this bill does,” DeSantis added.
