Eric Adams Has Been Retooling the Racist Republican Playbook to His Advantage
Eric Adams, who’s waiting for the votes to be counted as he appears to be on the verge of becoming New York City’s next mayor, has had a lot to say about anti-Black racism in politics lately—at least where his own campaign is concerned.
In the weeks leading to election day, Adams equated questions about whether he resides in a Bed-Stuy basement unit or commutes from New Jersey to birther claims that “Obama was not born in America”; called a New York magazine profile detailing his connections to an assortment of corrupt sleazeballs and power brokers “a despicable racist portrayal,” and on Juneteenth portrayed the alliance between primary rivals Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia as an attack upon the ancestors undertaken “while we were celebrating liberation and freedom from enslavement.” Just 48 hours out from election day, Adams started using phrases like “poll tax” and “voter suppression”—while ominously alluding to “America’s dark past” and current GOP “stop the vote” efforts “across the country”—as his campaign circulated statements from surrogates outright stating that the Yang-Garcia partnership was an attempt to “steal the election.”
All this was a redefinition of anti-Black racism at a moment when it was politically advantageous for Adams. The former police captain was labeling perfectly valid questions and critiques as discrimination, exploiting Black New Yorkers’ justified fears and weariness of racism for his own political advancement in a page right out of the racist Republican playbook rewritten for his advantage.