seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Ukraine
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Denmark
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Peru
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Canada
I constantly see posts about people asking where the Black Mamdanis and AOCs are.
And every time I hear that, I just kinda stop and stare at a wall wide eyed.
Cause I don’t know how to answer that question.
Because, to ask that question in the first place means the person asking is ignoring our incredible Black elected officials.
It has to.
They can’t ask that question if they know who Mayor Brandon Scott is or Reps Lauren Underwood, Joyce Beatty or Sydney Kamlager Dove. And those are just four of hundreds, and I do mean HUNDREDS of examples.
But I don’t want this to be a dissertation, you probably wouldn’t read it if it was, so let me focus on these four.
Mayor Brandon Scott leads Baltimore, Maryland. He has been in office six years now, and the homicide rate is going down every single month. May was the first time in five decades that homicide rate was in the single digits.
He did this through new programs like Group Violence Reduction, which launched in 2022 and established ones like Safe Streets which has been around since 2007.
And he’s not done. He barely considers this an accomplishment because homicides are still happening.
And he’s not going to rest till they aren’t.
Rep Lauren Underwood (IL-14) is 39 years old, but she has been in office since she was 31. At the time she was the youngest Black woman to ever be in Congress. And she ran with that.
Her longest fight has been working to get the Black Maternal Health package to pass the House. And she hasn’t stopped fighting for it. She was a nurse and is disabled herself and that informs everything she fights for.
And she won’t stop fighting for that package till it passes.
Rep Joyce Beatty (OH-03) may be 76, but she is the reason that Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center, and when the tarp comes down, she will be the reason for that too.
She has been on the Kennedy Center board as an ex officio member (a board member from Congress) since 2019 and when the phone call happened to rename the Center, her line was muted. So she sued, and won.
This is one of the biggest wins against Trump coming from our Democrats in Congress. Cause it didn’t just stop something, it reversed it.
And she will keep filing these lawsuits till the Kennedy Center is restored in full.
And last but certainly not least, Rep Sydney Kamlager Dove (CA-37) is one of my favorite Reps. She is loud and dramatic in the best way possible. She’s not afraid to swear and is constantly trying to raise awareness about how much damage Trump is causing.
She will walk out of hearings to make a point when she thinks they’re unfair, like the June 3 hearing with Marco Rubio.
One of my favorite things from her is her “Is this Shit Legal?” series, where she reminded her audience time and time again of all the illegal things Trump was doing, and highlighted what Dems are doing to stop them.
She explains what’s going on in Congress in words everyone can comprehend, and I will never understand how she’s not one of the people everyone talks about the most.
So, where are the Mamdanis and AOCs? They’re right there. They’re elected already. They’re doing incredible work every single day.
I just wish more people knew their names.
If you wanna change that, the call to action is really simple. Follow more Black electeds on social media and spread their work.
Because they are here and they are Progressive and they are loud and they are fighting.
Brandon Scott punishes Axton Lowe in a Camel Clutch.
Have you seen Channel Zero (2016-2018)?
Yes
Partially
No, but I've heard of it
Never heard of it
Kamala Harris, derided as a future “DEI president,” can credit hard work and talent for her success, writes Dean Obeidallah, dismissing raci
Dean Obeidallah for CNN:
“America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris,” screamed the headline of an op-ed in The New York Post on Saturday penned by Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino. The longtime media figure began his article by slamming Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as “literally destroying businesses.” Gasparino then took aim at the vice president, writing that “the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket.” Gasparino’s suggestion that Harris only got to where she is because of diversity programs — not because she earned it — is despicable. It reeks of the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people and, therefore, we achieve success and positions of influence not on the merits, but only with the help of a diversity program. (I once was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)
Gasparino’s use of “DEI hire” apparently to demean the achievements of a person of color is far from the first time we’ve seen this. In fact, just last week, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado took a page from this same vile playbook in a social media post attacking White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Boebert — who in the past suggested that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Muslim, was a terrorist — was apparently upset with Jean-Pierre’s comments about Biden’s workday being many hours longer than she believed to be true, so she smeared her as a “discredited DEI hire.” Earlier this year, the same DEI-as-insult line was used to attack the Black mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Scott responded to the smears by stating, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say ‘DEI mayor’.” He added bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” The mayor later gloriously trolled the bigots, telling MSNBC that the acronym “DEI” actually stands for “duly-elected incumbent.”
[...] There’s no hiding what’s intended with these types of attacks. In fact, Gasparino was not shy on this point, writing Harris was only picked by Biden as his running mate in 2020 because as a Black woman she “checked all the boxes.” Never mind the fact that Harris had been a public servant for more than 16 years at the time: first as an elected district attorney of San Francisco, and later as the elected attorney general for the state of California, where she oversaw the largest state justice department in the country. In that office, she successfully secured billions of dollars in damages from unscrupulous businesses that had preyed on Californians. Nor does it matter to her detractors that Harris was then elected to the US Senate in 2016, where she made a name for herself with her service on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees. Nope, Gasparino apparently attributes her many achievements to her being given preferential treatment because of her race and gender. He predicted that if President Joe Biden ends up remaining on the 2024 ticket and wins, it’s unlikely he would physically be able to serve four years. The result, he says, is that “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.” Of course, none of what Gasparino said was written in a vacuum. It’s in keeping with efforts by Republicans to try to discredit both the achievements by people of color as well as efforts to address our nation’s past acts of racism and racial discrimination. That’s been evident for months, as GOP-led legislatures rush to enact laws restricting and even outlawing DEI programs in education, state government, contracting, pension investments and other aspects of civic life.
Dean Obeidallah wrote on CNN’s website calling out the racist attack of labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI hire” by Fox Business reporter and New York Post contributor Charles Gasparino. The “DEI hire” line said by right-wingers like Gasparino is nothing more than vile racism.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been the target of racist attacks following last week's Key Bridge collapse.
"They don't have the courage to say the N-word."
