Byron Donalds was elected governor of Florida on Tuesday. He is the first Black governor in the state’s history and the first Black Republican ever elected governor of any state in the country.
On MS NOW, Symone Sanders Townsend acknowledged the win and then immediately took it back. As they say in my community, she offered, all kinfolk ain’t skinfolk. What she meant, she explained, is that Donalds is making history but will continue the political direction Ron DeSantis set in Florida:
MS NOW host Symone Sanders Townsend suggested Tuesday that Florida Republican Byron Donalds wasn’t true “kinfolk” with other Black Americans after acknowledging his historic victory in the state’s race for governor.
Sanders Townsend questioned the political significance of Donalds’ victory, saying he would continue Gov. Ron DeSantis’ agenda.
“I will say, though, you know, as they say in my community, all kinfolk ain’t skinfolk,” Sanders Townsend said, although she appeared to mean it the other way around.
“And what I say and what I mean by that is Byron Donalds is making history, but he is going to continue the political direction that Ron DeSantis is going to continue in Florida.”
Yeah, a majority of Florida voters hope he’ll continue along the same path as DeSantis; Donalds is a Republican and so is DeSantis.
So: historic, asterisk. A first, but not the good kind. The man cleared a bar nobody in Florida had cleared in 180 years, and the response from a national cable network was a folk saying that exists for exactly one purpose, which is to inform a Black person that other Black people have reviewed his file and found him insufficiently Black.
Say it in plainer English and it’s “Uncle Tom,” which is what everyone watching understood.
Now run the thought experiment. Suppose a Democrat had won that race and become Florida’s first Black governor. There would be a week of coverage. There would be the phrase “shattered a barrier.” There would be panels on what it means for the South, retrospectives on Reconstruction, a montage with music. Nobody would have said a word about whether his policy agenda made the milestone less of a milestone, because for a Democrat the milestone is never conditional on the policy agenda. It’s conditional on the party registration, and the party registration is assumed.
This is not a one-off. It is the standing operating procedure.
Tim Scott is the first Black senator elected from South Carolina and the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. For that he has been called a prop, a token, and worse by people who hold themselves out as champions of representation. Winsome Earle-Sears ran to be Virginia’s first Black woman governor and got a wave of racist abuse from the left for her trouble — the kind that would have ended careers if the target had been a Democrat.
Clarence Thomas has sat on the Supreme Court for 35 years and remains, in the eyes of the people who claim to care most about Black achievement, an embarrassment rather than a landmark.
The through-line is simple. The celebration of diversity is real right up to the moment it produces someone with the wrong opinions, and then it switches off like a light. Representation was never the point. It was the packaging on a product, and the product is votes.
Joe Biden said the quiet part on the radio in 2020: if you have trouble figuring out whether you’re for him or for Trump, then you ain’t Black. He apologized for the phrasing. Nobody apologized for the premise, because the premise is the whole business model.
Florida voters, including a meaningful share of Black Floridians who have been drifting rightward for three straight cycles, just made a choice. A network responded by telling them their choice doesn’t count as kin.
Byron Donalds takes the oath in January. The history happened whether the overt hypocrite racists over at MS NOW are willing to say so or not.
