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.”
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.