‘Thanks for visiting Florida’: one Black family’s road trip to a ‘hostile’ tourist trap

The NAACP has issued a warning about the state. But being Black in America was a long-odds game well before DeSantis showed up

The sugary sand on Santa Rosa Beach is cool below the surface, sweet relief after a 10-minute hot-step from the parking lot with an armload of bulky chairs and a hangry toddler dragging me down. But by the third day of our family vacation, my young boys have settled in with their plastic shovels and left me cracking open a Michelob Ultra before noon. Drinking in the brew and the whooshing azure surf, I'm gobsmacked that this is what passes for adventure travel nowadays.

On 20 May the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, noting a flagrant streak of contempt for and hostility toward Black, ethnic and queer communities; in a news release, the group quoted the state-sanctioned war on woke" the Republican governor championed in a craven bid for his party's presidential nomination. The NAACP board chair, Leon Russell, cited Ron DeSantis for political grandstanding" and courting a dangerous, extremist minority" - only to have conservatives mock Russell himself for living in Tampa.