This is an opinion column.

"The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."

--Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, on 1903 launch of his seminal treatise, "The Souls of Black Folk."



We can't avoid it now. We can't hide within some colorless, fantasy utopia. We can't kid ourselves into thinking anything else is more defining--more at the nexus between who we are and who we want to be.

Right now.

A century plus 15 years since the eminent Dr. W.E.B Du Bois called the "color line" the "problem" of his century, and almost two years since the election of Donald Trump, our millstone is race.

Yes, the vigorous pursuit of gender equity and all efforts to stem the broadening class divide are also at our core. Yet race weighs upon us every day. It peppers our timelines, to exhaustiion, at times.

It's the virus infecting our elections.

Right now.

Not just the midterm elections, either. But local and statewide elections taking place in cities throughout America that are geographically far from Washington, D.C. but inextricably tied to it.

Before Tuesday, you probably didn't know Andrew Gillum from Andy Warhol.

I didn't either, truth be told.

Not very long ago, the mayor of Tallahassee, Fla., was a quixotic gubernatorial candidate in a field of fat cats. He's African-American. The fat cats weren't.

You certainly know Andrew Gillum now--thanks to a well-organized, indefatigable campaign and monster voter-registration efforts from, among others, the likes of the same Woke Vote folks who helped turn Alabama topsy-turvy last year.

On Tuesday, Gillum shocked/stunned/left speechless a plethora of pundits who paid him no mind by beating the fat cats by winning the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

He's the first African-American in the state to do so--and the second black Democratic gubernatorial hopeful deep in the heart of Dixie, along with Stacy Abrams in Georgia. (With Ben Jealous in Maryland, there are three Democratic gubernatorial nominees in a nation with zero African-American state leaders.)

It didn't take very long at all for race to show its ugly self in Florida.

Even before my first cup of coffee the next morning, Ron DeSantis, the Trump-cloaked (cloned?) Republican who won the Republican nomination, boldly referred to Gillum on national television with words dripping in racial animus.

He condescendingly called Gillum "articulate," a word that grates black folks like fingernails on a blackboard --because we know it is silently followed by "...for a black person."

I've heard it more times than I can remember and usually from someone less articulate.

DeSantis also went all in, saying Florida voters shouldn't "monkey this up" by electing Gillum.

The man might as well have been carrying a bamboo tiki torch.

A U.S. Congressman since 2012, DeSantis was rightfully vilified, mostly from Democrats, though. He was, surprisingly, even somewhat admonished by a Fox News anchor.

His team later tried to temper the storm with a "clarification". DeSantis was referring to Gillum's policies and not the candidate, they said (wink). But they also discredited their feeble response by snidely adding it was "absurd" to think he meant anything otherwise.

What's absurd is to believe DeSantis, no matter what he "meant", didn't know exactly what he was saying, the words he used and what they mean in these racially tenuous times. The man has a degree in U.S. history from Yale, for goodness sakes.

That he was so comfortable using those words reveals yet again just how much Trump has normalized racism. And not just as president.

In 1989, he famously called for the death penalty for five black and Latino teens who were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. They were acquitted.

Since then, he's made abhorrent remarks about brown-skinned immigrants and the nations in which they live, said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, consistently attacked black athletes -and if you believe the juicy revelations from Omarosa Manigault-Newman, her ex-boss has used that word.

Now, his political clones are comfortable with using coded language that isn't very coded at all.

As we lurch towards November, candidates throughout the nation will rightfully spar over policy differences, often drawing blood. That's politics.

Any candidate, however, who blithely and blindly goes "all-in" with Trump, who uses his name as much as their own in campaign ads and speeches, also embraces the heinous millstone of racial divisiveness the president has sown.

Whether they mean to or not.

So, watch what you say because we broke the code long ago.



Roy S. Johnson's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com or/and follow me at twitter.com/roysj.