Over the last year or so, varied and sundry right-wing lunatics have been drumming up a hysteria over diversity, equity and inclusion practices (DEI) largely because their various other hysterias over terms like “woke” and “critical race theory” have grown stale, and they need something to bring Republicans to the polls now that they can see the abortion regulations are not working out so well for them.
Now that hysteria is doing what it was always intended to do: It has driven Mohammed Albehadli, the diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator for public schools in South Portland, Maine, to quit his job and flee the whole state after getting a threatening letter from a white supremacist.
Hard to blame him!
Albehadli is an an Iraqi immigrant who came to the US a decade ago in order to escape the horrors that we inflicted upon his country in our zeal to go after terrorists who weren’t even from there. He holds degrees from Trinity College and Boston University, and according to the school superintendent, he was “an exemplary staff member” who made a “positive impact” on the schools.
But as much support as he has from the community, Albehadli has no interest in putting himself or his family at risk and is not going to wait around for things to take a scary turn. “You hear something first. And the next thing, an action follows,” he said, according to the AP.
The email came from New Hampshire resident Ryan Murdough, the founder of the New England White Network, who has been sending unhinged racist emails to various people throughout New England since at least 2010. Murdough previously ran for the state Legislature as a Republican — though that was before the rest of the GOP was quite as enthusiastic as they currently are about saying the quiet part out loud, so he lost.
In the slur-filled email, Murdough wrote, “White parents don't want their children going to school with black and brown kids who don't belong in the United States” — which, given how strongly Democratic South Portland is, seems a whole lot like wishful thinking on his part.
Murdough explained on Gab (because of course he is on Gab — although he only has 2100 followers, which is pretty pathetic for a white supremacist who has been in the game as long as he has) that he sent the letter in response to an article on how Albehadli and three other members of the school board’s Elementary Boundaries and Configurations Steering Committee were discussing the possibility of restructuring area elementary schools in order to make them less racially and economically segregated. That’s it. That’s what he’s upset about.
By all possible measures and reports, it seems clear that Albehadli was more welcome, wanted and appreciated in this community than Murdough is or would be. It seems fair to say that absolutely no one in South Portland wants to live in the “white/European homeland” that Murdough believes the United States was meant to be.
There are a whole lot of people out there who like to claim that their opposition to diversity initiatives isn’t racist or sexist, but that they just want to make sure that “the most qualified person” gets the job, which would only make sense if there were always exclusively one “most qualified person” for every job. This story demonstrates, on multiple levels, why this is absolute bullshit.
The fantasy is a “merit based society” that they imagine would definitively prove that heterosexual white men actually are the most qualified at any job they want to do. The reality is that a qualified person of color was run out of a job — in the midst of a project designed to ensure access to a good education for all the children in his city, which would, in the future, lead to a larger pool of “qualified applicants” — because a white supremacist lunatic het up about “DEI” started harassing him.
PREVIOUSLY:
I would really like the press, and everyone else, to stop pretending it is about economic anxiety or culture wars or faith or whatever excuse we like to tell ourselves because we have magat friends or relations.
It is all about bigotry. Always has been
The most obvious way to make sure that only a white hetero male is "the most qualified person for the job" is to make sure that nobody else ever gets enough education to even compete. At least these dudes are consistent.