“This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge,” the user wrote alongside a clip of Scott speaking. “It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.”
The post was immediately fact checked and even came with an advisory.
“Brandon Scott was elected as Mayor of Baltimore in 2020 with > 70% of the vote,” the advisory reads. “He did not come in to office through any DEI practices, appointments, etc.” This isn’t the first instance of a racist swapping out the N-word with “DEI”—but it certainly is one of the most brazen.
my read was that by putting “banning” in quotes, there was a subtext to the comment.
no one is “banning” words - the milieu is that we don’t use certain words for certain (in this case obvious and terrible) reasons.
by pushing the focus to the “banning” and not the obvious dog whistle, this comment seems to be shifting the convo away from people being racist shits to a discussion on language.
hence this entire comment chain.
i just want people to get the takeaway that jesus fuck people are racist, not “liberals can’t ban words, see?”
Maybe I’m being overly generous here, to me the user just sounded frustrated with the boundaries of civil discourse masking but not solving a problem. I assumed the problem was self-evident/they weren’t denying it.
To me that feels like a call for more action, not less. It’s all too easy to pretend something isn’t happening when the verbiage around it becomes more palatable (exactly what dog whistles are for).
But again, maybe I’m being too generous.