Deriding DEI is the Right’s Attempt at a Polite Way to Attack Civil Rights
“DEI mayor.”
That’s how a troll on X, formerly Twitter, labeled a news clip of Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott delivering an update on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was struck by a massive cargo ship.
“It’s going to be so, so much worse,” the tweet concluded. “Prepare accordingly.”
I don’t know precisely what we are supposed to prepare for — and I imagine the troll doesn’t know, either. Some people, as I have learned on the receiving end of such bone-headed remarks in my own correspondence, don’t need to know what they’re talking about. They just want to vent.
But I was struck by the troll’s language. “DEI mayor”? So, that’s the latest way to call someone an “affirmative action” hire, meaning a way to insult someone as being unqualified for their position without using even more offensive language.
DEI is short for diversity, equity and inclusion, virtues that have become a vice in today’s discourse on the political right, just like the earlier label “affirmative action,” which the right casts as “reverse discrimination.”
No, mayors like Scott, 39, are elected, not employed under DEI hiring practices.
“What they mean by DEI, in my opinion,” Scott quipped in a later MSNBC interview, “is Duly Elected Incumbent.”
But the initials have taken on a life of their own as code, dressing up other epithets that are even less polite while delivering the same vile message.
Shortly after the bridge collapse, the Twitterverse churned with nasty tweets that, without offering anything resembling actual evidence, nevertheless blamed DEI for the disaster in which six people died.
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