By: Jennifer Lacostia
Brooklyn’s Democratic Borough President Eric Adams did what Democrats are so good at doing: he played the always divisive race card.
It took place on the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday — at the National Action Network’s “King Day Celebration,” hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton — and Adams, thus far the most effective fundraiser for the upcoming mayoral election, used acrimony to try and dredge up support.
“Go back to Iowa, you go back to Ohio,” Adams, who is black, ranted during an event in Harlem that drew a crowd of approximately 300. “New York City belongs to the people that was here and made New York City what it is.”
Iowa and Ohio, it should be noted, are respectively 91 and 82 percent white. Adams pandered still more to voters of color in painting them as particular victims of social ills and violent crimes.
He further profaned the day by trying to cloak himself in Dr. King’s persona: “If you know the spirit and anything about Dr. King, he did not allow others to be comfortable while everyone else was living in horrific conditions.”
Adams shamelessly carried on about the so-called “displacement of the people who made this city,” adding, “You were here before Starbucks. You were here before others came and decided they wanted to be part of this city.”
New arrivals from elsewhere in America, the borough president spat, are “folks who [are] not only hijacking your apartments and displacing your living arrangements, they displace your conversation and say the things that are important to you are no longer important. And they decide what’s important and what is not important.”
When people took to Twitter to vent their outrage over what Adams has said, he cravenly went on the defensive, tweeting: “Anyone can be a New Yorker, but not everyone comes to our city with the spirit of being part of our city. I have a problem with that, and I’m unapologetic in asking more of our new arrivals to communities who were once waking up to gun shots and not alarm clocks.”
Also listening was Ohio’s Republican chairman Robert Frost, who rolled out the welcome carpet to those offended by Adams racism. “We got a lot of great things going on in Ohio. Ohio has an open door if people are frustrated in New York.”
As theunionjournal.com correctly pointed out afterward, this was not Adams’ first race-baiting tirade.
/eric-adams-tells-new-new-yorkers-to-go-back-to-iowa/
“At a Dec 17 ribbon-cutting for new inexpensive real estate for senior citizens as well as LGBT New Yorkers, Adams recommended that the structure– whose occupants are extremely bad individuals of shade– was not “inclusive” of the NYCHA neighborhood where it was constructed,” the news site reported. ““I can’t celebrate a building that is not going to be inclusive,” Adams stated at the time. “Because if you have a body of people over there that feels as though this place here is not for them — we’re going to have incidents in this community that will be disruptive.”
