Mayor Brandon Scott, who had raced to the scene, went before television cameras to give an update on the “unthinkable tragedy,” as any mayor would have done. But Scott is African American — and for MAGA trolls on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, that means he can’t be seen as just any mayor.
“This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge,” one such troll posted, along with a clip of Scott’s remarks, to his more than 275,000 followers. “It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.”
“DEI” is shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion. For decades, since the triumph of the civil rights movement, those concepts have been lauded in our public discourse as virtues. For the unhinged far right, however, “DEI” has come to mean “any Black or Brown person who holds a position of authority that we think should have gone to a White man.”
Scott’s anonymous attacker drew amens from a like-minded crowd on X. “He looks like your average street criminal,” wrote one. “Dude just looks like someone who was there as an eye witness lol,” offered another.
Okay, you could argue that this might be more stupid than racist. Mayors don’t get their jobs through DEI hiring practices; they earn them through a process called democracy. Scott, 39, was elected in 2020 in a landslide, winning more than 70 percent of the vote. In a city whose population is more than 60 percent African American, according to Census Bureau figures, it should surprise no one that the mayor might happen to be Black.
One of Scott’s MAGA critics on X, however, took these facts into account and still tried to delegitimize him: “DEI: Who cares when your city is going to sh-t because of drugs, increased crime, defunding police and poor infrastructure when you have a Mayor that ‘looks like you’, WINNING!!!!!”
Man, get a life. Baltimore has been a poster child for the ravages of deindustrialization for the past half-century, under mayors both White and Black. But crime has been reduced markedly under Scott’s tenure, with homicides in 2023 falling by 20 percent from the previous year — to the lowest tally in nearly a decade.
I don’t need to defend Scott, because he’s perfectly capable of defending himself. “We’ve been the boogeyman for them since the first day they brought us to this country,” he said of his racist critics in an MSNBC interview. “What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is ‘duly elected incumbent.’ We know what they want to say. But they don’t have the courage to say the N-word.”
They might not say it out loud, at least not yet. But racists now hurl that word to me, in emails and other private communications, with a gusto I haven’t seen since the days of Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, also a Black Democrat, has also been attacked by the anti-DEI crowd for having had the temerity to appoint the first African American woman to serve on the Maryland Port Commission. “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens,” posted Phil Lyman, a Utah legislator who is running for governor of his state. “DEI did this,” posted Anthony Sabatini, a GOP congressional candidate in Florida’s 11th District, over a video clip of the bridge’s collapse.
Asked by CNN to comment, Moore said, “I have no time for foolishness.” He and Scott are rightly focused on clearing megatons of debris from the harbor channel, which will allow the Port of Baltimore to reopen, and eventually replacing the fallen span with a new bridge.
The rest of us, though, should take a moment to ponder the bridge the American right has crossed — a bridge leading to the Jim Crow past.
It would be wrong to blame all of this on Donald Trump. He didn’t invent racism. But by bulldozing the guardrails that used to delimit our political rhetoric, he has given permission for quiet racism to be shouted from the rooftops. In the MAGA universe, people are saying racist things expecting to be not shamed but rewarded.
Sigh. In my lifetime, we’ve already fought this battle once — and won. Now, we fight it again.
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