PORTLAND — Yvette McDonnell and her family are all over the place.

On Wednesday night, they were featured on all of the local television news stations and print media stories were popping up all over the internet.

Yvette hosted a meeting at the Maine People’s Alliance office in Portland and other engagements are planned.

By early Thursday night, the McDonnell family’s video response to Gov. Paul LePage had been viewed more than 11,000 times.

In the video, Yvette appears with her husband, Bob, and their young daughter to address what they feel were racially charged comments from the governor.

“He’s given consent to people to target people of color,” Bob says in the video. 

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Yvette uses a previous quote from the governor in which he describes people coming into Maine, many of them people of color, as the enemy. Thus was born the McDonnell family’s “We Are Not the Enemy” campaign, in which they are encouraging others to share their own videos and photos.

The McDonnell family intends to create a montage of the submissions.

“LePage is creating a hostile environment for people of color and for Hispanics and he’s vilifying us,” Yvette says. “His statements have authorized law enforcement and other citizens to take racial profiling actions against who LePage deems as the enemy, which are people of color and Hispanics.”

“It doesn’t matter what we look like,” says the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, Anjali. “It matters who we are.”

The point of the effort, according to the family’s Facebook post, is to demonstrate the misguided nature of LePage’s comments by getting Mainers of all races to share information about themselves.

“We are the McDonnell family,” according to the post, “and we are homeowners, taxpayers, a drug and alcohol counselor and so much more.”

By 7 p.m., the McDonnell’s post had been shared 259 times and comments numbered into the dozens.

“You are a lovely family,” one woman commented, “and I’m so sad that this video is even needed. Shame on you Governor LePage.”

The McDonnells were asking that photo and video responses to the governor be sent to wearenottheenemylepage@gmail.com and that the hashtags #wearenottheenemylepage and #wearenottheenemylepagechallenge be shared.


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