The National Hockey League is at the forefront of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ war on “woke.”
The NHL recently studied its workforce and revealed a majority of its employees to be straight white males. In an effort to fix that, the NHL launched the “Hockey is for Everyone” initiative. As part of that initiative, the NHL planned to host a Pathway to Hockey Summit, a type of job fair in Florida in which potential employees were asked to identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino.
That event is no longer taking place as originally planned, according to a spokesman for Governor DeSantis.
“We do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against an unpopular demographic,” DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, said. He demanded that the NHL “remove and denounce” the “prohibitions it has imposed” on the event’s attendees.
The NHL deleted the original post, only to re-post the event without the self-identifying criteria for potential attendees. The NHL’s current workforce is 62 percent male and 84 percent white, according to its most recent study.
Governor DeSantis won sweeping re-election in the 2022 midterms, defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Christ with 59 percent of the vote.
