MSNBC host Joy Reid and political analyst Juanita Tolliver were stunned by remarks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made about basketball players, linking them to the current controversy over the teaching of slavery.

On Thursday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The ReidOut, Reid played a clip from a June DeSantis interview that the host and Tolliver saw as coded, and related it to the governor’s defense of the Florida curriculum on Black history that includes teaching that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”:

JOY REID: You know, Andrew Gillum, he famously said, “I’m not saying Ron DeSantis is a racist. I’m just saying the racists seem to think that he’s a racist.” Let me play him in his own words. This is Ron DeSantis, who played baseball in college. Talk about baseball versus basketball.

RON DESANTIS: I think that there’s kind of a place for everybody on a baseball team if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to practice, and if you’re willing to hone your skills. So I kind of thought it was always a very Democratic game, a very meritocratic game, whereas I kind of viewed like, like basketball is like “These guys are just freaks of nature!”

JOY REID: EH!

JUANITA TOLLIVER: OH!!! It’s no wonder! It’s no wonder that he makes stupid statements around slavery being beneficial for enslaved people when that’s what he thinks about basketball players, which we know is code for Black people. Right? Like that it just oozes through his pores. The racism and the White Supremacy. Like how? How how how has this man been able to advance so far? And I have another question. What will it take to stop him? Thankfully, he’s getting his own way in that regard. Thankfully, he’s running his own campaign into the ground.

JOY REID: He’s stopping himself. I mean, we found out, at first they thought this insane sort of homoerotic, but also homophobic ad. You know, people were like, Oh, I wonder what PAC made that? It turned out it was his campaign! He made they made the ad for him. And now what you’re seeing is this exodus because, you know, running for governor, running for president, when you’re a governor, you’re supposed to use your the state of your state as sort of the you know, this is the tried and true. This is what I can do. Not only all the problems I mentioned earlier, you have conventions now leaving. The Game of Thrones convention is like peace out. We’re not doing it in Florida. You’ve got all these other conventions. National Association of Black Society of Engineers was like, Nope, we’re not doing our convention, we’re going to go to Atlanta now. Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and corporate has said, peace, we’re not coming to Orlando. We ain’t coming because of him. How does he run for president when he’s running conventions out of his state?

JUANITA TOLLIVER: I mean, it also tracks with the NAACP releasing a full travel warning for Black and brown people because the state is so harmful. Look.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The ReidOut.

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