Reporting by Noah Goldberg from his home in Sarasota, Florida.

Sarasota County is a beautiful ocean-front gatekeeper. The city of Sarasota includes a large number of retirees on either end of Ringling Bridge, which connects to St. Armand’s Key and Longboat Key, two significant retirement communities.

Snowbirds may flock in from the North for the entirety of winter, however “Gen Zers” are no strangers to the area.  Siesta Key Beach was awarded “America’s Best Beach” in 2011, drawing in massive crowds of spring breakers. In 2019, over 2.7 million visitors came to Sarasota, spending $1.88 billion, generating $3.1 billion in total impact and creating over 25,000 jobs.

While the location of its population is fluid, as many retirement and spring break communities are, the racial makeup is not.  Sarasota County’s population is 91.5% white. Despite a major minority population, it has been home to racially charged incidents.  On July 4th, 2018, one African-American family staying at the Art Ovation hotel discovered a post-it note stuck to a lamp bulb with racist commentary. “Unacknowledged segregation makes it easy for affluent, white residents to overlook the ‘invisible’ black community, which in turn perpetuates the delusion that we don’t have any race problem,” Carrie Siedman wrote in an opinion piece for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2018.

Ringling is a name visitors to Sarasota will hear often. John Ringling, the primary of the five founding brothers of the Ringling Brothers Circus, moved the winter quarters of the circus to Sarasota in 1927 with Charles Ringling, where the two held real estate interests. They were seen as pioneers of development in the city for creating a major tourist attraction with the circus. Today, their legacy lives on at the Ringling Museum, a popular local institution.