Right-wingers smear Brandon Scott, who was elected with over 70%, as a diversity hire after Key Bridge collapse
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott hit back at critics who called him a “DEI mayor” after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse this week.
Right-wing social media users bizarrely labeled Scott, who was elected with over 70% of the vote, “Baltimore’s DEI mayor” following a press conference on the collapse.
MSNBC host Joy Reid noted that Scott was overwhelmingly elected in a predominantly Black city.
“So by right-wing logic, a ‘diversity hire’ would have been a white man,” Reid said Wednesday.
“I know, and we know, and you know very well that Black men, and young Black men in particular, have been the bogeyman for those who are racist and think that only straight, wealthy White men should have a say in anything,” Scott told Reid.
“We’ve been the bogeyman for them since the first day they brought us to this country, and what they mean by DEI in my opinion is duly elected incumbent,” he continued. “We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word, and the fact that I don’t believe in their untruthful and wrong ideology. And I am very proud of my heritage and who I am and where I come from, scares them, because me being at my position means that their way of thinking, their way of life of being comfortable while everyone else suffers is going to be at risk, and they should be afraid because that’s my purpose in life.”
Notwithstanding the unfathomable depths of racist wingnuttery (or possibly depths of unfathomable racist wingnuttery), what.
No, really. What. What’s the angle here? Are they implying that somehow the mayor of Baltimore somehow personally caused the ship to hit that bridge?
Or that he was responsible for how it was built in 1972? 12 years before Brandon Scott, Mayor of Baltimore was born?
Much much simpler than that. Remember how just a few months ago everything the right didn’t like was “woke”? And a few months before that how everything the right didn’t like was CRT?
Well, we are here now. All problems are a result of DEI. It really does not matter that it’s completely insane to view the world like this. Right wing media has it’s current swear word of the month and that word (or in this case acronym) is DEI.
What’s super effective about this tactic is exactly what the mayor hints at. It’s a way to say the n-word without saying it.
The angle here is the right is a bunch of racist bigots and framing all the ills of the world in terms of that racist bigotry makes their lizard brained viewers happy (well, angry, but at the right people).
Quiet literally how Nazi propaganda worked. Blame all the problems of germany on the jews and the non-jews right wing morons will happily nod along with “yer right, it is the Jews’ fault our society is crumbling!” It did not have to make sense or be reasonable. You just constantly plant that fear and suspicion in your dumbass follower’s brains.
I don’t think it’s an acronym. How are you pronouncing it?
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
So you don’t even use the initialism?
You know the whole acronym vs initialism thing is a somewhat new idea? And there’s no hard and fast agreement on it. To correct people on whether something is an acronym or not (especially when they are using it within the term’s original meaning) is simply pedantic.
It’s not a “new” thing just because you just learned about it.
“The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records the first printed use of the word initialism as occurring in 1899, but it did not come into general use until 1965, well after acronym had become common”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
Who cares. Let’s focus on what’s actually important here: racist shitbags.
We both know who cares. Who would derail a discussion about bigotry by making pedantic observations on grammar or language?
It’s similar to how they’re using the disaster to decry open borders allowing terrorists in. Meanwhile, the crew on the bridge that died in the disaster, on their night shift lunch break from fixing potholes, was made up almost exclusively of immigrants… everything is just an opportunity to grab engagement for your talking points now, no matter how absurd. The idea that this disaster is being used to fan hatred of immigrants, while the people who were killed were literally hard-working immigrants… it just breaks my brain.
So basically I guess, no surprise that they’re also somehow connecting the bridge to Brandon Scott, and diversity hires (lol, he won an election fuckos, not an HR hiring process). It’s all a part of the unreality we now live in.
Everyone knows White people are better swimmers
A White mayor would have swam right up to that puppy and sank it instead
Baltimore was one of the cities which suffered the most from redlining and white flight in the 60s and 70s, and has been an anti-civil-rights talking point for racist assholes since then. The city literally ran interstates through black neighborhoods to have an excuse to tear them down, and then refused to sell the property in other areas. Then, when the civil rights act happened, the county worked very hard to set up demarcation boundaries for city services to make sure that the tax revenue from the wealthy suburbs would stay completely separate.
Basically white people in Baltimore were told they had to live near Black people and they threw a massive tantrum about it.
a press conference on the collapse gave them the platform to spew their hate, other than that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issue.
edit: he’s also an incumbent so they’ve probably been calling him that for his entire previous term already.