Author

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts is a columnist for the Florida Phoenix. She has been writing for news outlets since 1983 and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.

COMMENTARY
sugar cane being ground in a 19th Century windmill

We aren’t supposed to imply that the Founders (slaveholders) weren’t always paragons of virtue

By: - May 26, 2023

LONDON – In 2022, the Prince and Princess of Wales (you know them as William and Kate) toured the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean, former slave colonies. They made a bit of a mess. At one event the royal couple were supposed to meet a bunch of children, but found themselves separated from the kids […]

COMMENTARY

On anniversary of Rosewood attack, it’s sad to see DeSantis embrace FL’s Old South legacy

By: - January 4, 2023

It began in the usual way: A white woman (her name was Frances Taylor) accused a Black man of beating her. That was on New Year’s Day, 1923. It ended in the usual way, with violence, lynching, and destruction. That Jan. 2, a mob of white men drove to Rosewood, a mostly Black turpentine village […]

COMMENTARY

Your new Congress: Owning the libs, no matter the cost

By: - November 28, 2022

Are you excited about the 118th Congress? If not, you’re a communist. True, the U.S. Senate is still in the hands of the godless Democrats who want to destroy America, but the House of Representatives now belongs to Republicans, the party of God, AK-47s, F-150s (and not the electric kind, either), manliness, Merry Christmas, and […]

COMMENTARY

Florida is turning its back on the New South, embracing its Dixie-fied past

By: - November 23, 2022

Florida was once a New South state. From the early 1960s to 2000 or so, Florida had leaders who looked to the future, determined to leave Jim Crow behind and separate ourselves from the likes of Alabama. We had governors committed to equal justice, open government, and voting rights — however imperfectly achieved. No more. […]

COMMENTARY

FL’s U.S. senators fight phantom communists, Gestapo as the world burns

By: - August 18, 2022

It’s been a while since we checked in with Florida’s two brilliant and attractive U.S. senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio. First of all, they are both very upset about that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad FBI attack on Mar-A-Lago which happened for no reason other than the president took some boxes of paper […]

COMMENTARY

The impending miseducation of Florida’s schoolchildren

By: - July 26, 2022

As a great president once asked, “Is our children learning?” Well, is they? It don’t look good, what with government schools forcing them to become communists, hate America, and vote wrong. But never fear: Florida’s governor’s fixed that mess with new rules stopping those union-loving, Toni Morrison-reading, evolution-accepting, comfortable shoe-wearing, foreign movie-watching, gay-coddling teachers indoctrinating […]

COMMENTARY

We looked to the Supreme Court to protect our rights; now, it is taking them away

By: - June 27, 2022

The United States of America is no longer a free country. Women are no longer full citizens with equal rights. The theocracy also known as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that our bodies don’t belong to us. Anyone who is or can become pregnant will be a ward of the state, captive of a misogynist minority.

COMMENTARY

As the nation’s body count continues to mount, the NRA and its acolytes party on

By: - May 31, 2022

Despite what the braying anti-Roe Right wants you to think, America is not pro-life. This country is pro-death. Fetuses and firearms: that’s what makes America America — that and the ability of an 18 year-old to buy military grade weapons. At least 21 shot dead in Uvalde, Texas; 10 shot dead in Buffalo, N.Y.; a […]

COMMENTARY

U.S., U.K. vie to outdo each other in misogyny

By: - May 10, 2022

LONDON — Which country hates women more, the U.S. or the U.K.? In America, a woman will apparently soon be forced to carry a child to term, even if she was raped, even if she was trafficked, even if she can’t care for the kid, doesn’t want it, and having it means ruining her life. […]

COMMENTARY

Why are highly educated Republican politicians so anti-education?

By: - October 5, 2021

College is for pussies. Ron DeSantis, presidential candidate and part-time governor of Florida, celebrated the decline in the numbers of men entering higher education, citing a Wall Street Journal article that says 60 percent of college students are now women, while in 1970 the number was closer to 40 percent. “I guess there was a […]

COMMENTARY

Things could be worse — you could live in Florida

By: - September 21, 2021

Columnist explains how Sunshine State COVID craziness keeps getting deeper “Human kind,” said the poet, “cannot bear too much reality.” Many Republicans seem especially resistant, preferring to dwell in a miasma of Deep State conspiracies and Internet nonsense inspiring them to believe that Hillary Clinton drinks babies’ blood, Trump won the 2020 election, and that […]

Texas abortion foes play a dangerous game in encouraging vigilante law enforcement

By: - September 8, 2021

Americans like to say we don’t leave Americans behind. We don’t abandon people to be oppressed and victimized by a bunch of gun-toting yahoo zealots who hate freedom and hate science and think they have a direct line to God. So, when do we start evacuating women and girls from Texas?