Francis Scott Key Bridge courtesy of Jeff Covey via Flickr.
Max Rhoads ’25
Section Editor
On March 26, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed after a container ship collided with it in a tragedy that led to six deaths. However, after a clip of the city’s mayor, Brandon M. Scott, speaking about the tragedy circulated online, users quickly began attacking him.
Scott is Black, and many people on the political right, from civilian users to politicians on X, formerly known as Twitter, began to latch onto his race and blame him for the bridge’s failure. Many have taken to social media to infer that Scott was a “diversity hire” or blame diversity, equity and inclusion policies, also known as DEI, on the crash.
Unfortunately, this type of language is not uncommon, especially in the last few years. Cities with strong Black presences, such as Baltimore and Chicago, have frequently been derided by conservatives for having poor leadership and infrastructure, either implicitly or explicitly associating Blackness with disorder.
Code words and phrases for people of color, especially Black people, have been part of common American parlance for the longest time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the phrase of choice was “welfare queen,” intended to evoke a boogeyman of Black people taking advantage of government programs. Rhetoric like this has contributed to the diminishing — or outright elimination — of such programs.
After 2016, the term “woke” — originally a Black English vernacular term referring to social and political awareness — was co-opted by the right to refer to the inclusion of Black people, queer people or other minorities in a derogatory way. In 2021, “critical race theory” became a term of choice as well, with outlets such as Fox News and Republican politicians like Florida governor Ron DeSantis making false claims that American schools were teaching it. Currently, the coded term conservatives are using is diversity, equity and inclusion, or “DEI.” It was originally used to describe policies aimed at making workplaces and schools more equitable. The terms change, but the premise behind it remains the same: Some believe that minorities are receiving undue advantages and are responsible for the collapse of white American society.
These code phrases are nebulous enough to provide some plausible deniability, but if one notices whom they are most often levied at, the racism becomes clear. They all represent anger at the illusion of white superiority being threatened. After seeing the backlash against Mayor Scott, many people immediately caught on to what was really driving it, which was his Blackness. Black Twitter users began jokingly reclaiming the term, using DEI the same way as the n-slur, the joke being that conservatives were using DEI when what they wanted was to use the n-slur.
In recent years, these terms have been referred to as “dog whistles,” named after the device of the same name that plays a tone only dogs can hear. They are innocuous enough to an unfamiliar person and provide enough plausible deniability that people not affected by these remarks will not understand why they are bigoted. But we need to be vigilant. The language we use matters, and it is our responsibility to call out and deplatform racism when we see it.