“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
A far-Left organization just got a humiliating lesson on the pitfalls of dividing Americans on the basis of their skin color.
The radical group hired the head of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) office based on her apparent race… only to find out she’s secretly “as white as the driven snow.”
Raquel Evita Saraswati, 39, got a plumb post as Chief Equity, Inclusion and Culture Officer at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The socialist-leaning organization, which is associated with the Quakers, hired her because she’s a Muslim, queer, and “multiethnic.”
Or so they thought.
“In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim,’” said Oskar Pierre Castro, the HR official who hired her last June.
The problem is: She’s actually white.
Saraswati was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel — the name her mother called her when she blew the whistle.
“I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she,” her mother, Carol Perone, told the left-wing website The Intercept. “I’m German and British, and her father was Calabrese Italian.”
She is Muslim, her mom said: Seidel converted to Islam when she was in high school and started her slide into left-wing politics.
Before working at AFSC, “Saraswati” chaired the commission on LGBT affairs in the Philadelphia mayor’s office after years of paid jobs as an LGBT activist.
Her family shared pictures of “Saraswati” as a younger girl with much lighter skin tones, and other family members confirmed she’s Caucasian.
“She’s chosen to live a lie, and I find that very, very sad,” said her mom.
If her story sounds familiar, it should. The same thing happened to Nkechi Amare Diallo — but you know her as Rachel Dolezal, the “transracial” white woman who passed as black in order to nab a job as president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane and a professor of African studies at Eastern Washington University.
When the truth came out in 2015, she claimed she had always identified more with black than white culture.
Three years later, Dolezal was charged by Washington state with welfare fraud and eventually agreed to pay back almost $9,000 to avoid jail time.
And three years after that, she continued to be mystified that employers would not hire her, implying it might have something to do with racism.
Another left-wing ideologue accused of faking his racial background is Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist who grabbed national attention after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“A family member tells CNN that both of King’s parents are white,” reported CNN’s Don Lemon in 2015, who went on to talk to King. “Initially he did not answer but later referred to himself as biracial.”
Instead of admitting to the horrors of being white, King threw his own mother under the bus.
“I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man,” King wrote at the left-wing website DailyKos.
Why are so many people willing to go to shady and unethical lengths to lie about their own family history?
It could be CRT: Critical race theory teaches that all Americans are guilty of the sins committed by their European ancestors. Anyone who wants to be a “liberator” may want to join a different team.
But the motive may be simpler, an AFSC leader told The Intercept: It’s cold, hard cash.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DEI] “is becoming a multibillion-dollar industry: corporations, companies, nonprofits,” the leader stated. “Now you have white people in brown face getting into DEI positions, with its salary, resources, and power.”
“The people often hired in these positions are not qualified and will usually hurt, more than help, in redressing problems around inequities and exclusion,” said Muslim media critic Sana Saeed of Al Jazeera.
“To have hired such an individual is also a damning indictment of how superficial and detrimental, to safe and inclusive workplaces, DEI can often be,” Saeed said.
Giving power to people based only on race and hiring people based on their skin color — the core of CRT and DEI — can be exceptionally detrimental to people’s sense of personal identity and our country’s sense of reality… as Dolezal, King, and Seidel prove.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”