NYC Mayor Adams Compares Housing Activist to Plantation Owner
The woman, Jeanie Dubnau, an 84-year-old housing activist and molecular biologist, said in an interview afterward that her Jewish family had fled Europe during the Holocaust. She said that the rent increases were a “disaster” for seniors and she believes that the mayor attacked her because he did not have a strong defense for allowing them to happen.
“It was a complete deflection from what I was saying because he has no answer,” she said.
Mr. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has often raised concerns about racism when he has felt under attack. During the 2021 mayoral primary, he argued that his competitors, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, had joined forces to prevent “a person of color” — specifically a Black or Latino person — from becoming mayor. When he was blamed for Democrats losing the 2022 midterms in New York because he had raised fears over crime, Mr. Adams said his critics were insulting the Black and Latino communities who were most affected by gun violence.
More recently, he has twice compared himself to Kunta Kinte, a character from the 1977 television series “Roots” who was beaten for refusing to accept the slave name Toby.
“I know you think you can whip me and make me go from saying Kunta Kinte to Toby, but damn it, Kunta Kinte is all I know,” the mayor said at a Juneteenth celebration at Gracie Mansion after receiving criticism for the abrupt departure of his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, who announced her resignation earlier this month.
Mr. Adams also claimed recently that there was a “coordinated” effort to prevent him from winning a second term. When asked who was coordinating that effort, the mayor again compared himself to Kunta Kinte and said, “There’s a body of people who were pleased with 30 years without having a mayor that looked like me.”
Source: The New York Times
