We are at a loss to understand the calculus by which Mayor Adams came to attribute to race the negative coverage of his recent meetings with top State officials, primarily on the need for criminal justice. On the other hand, there should really be no mystery why his remarks went viral:
I’m a Black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people who don’t look like me. We got to be honest about that. How many Blacks are in the editorial boards? How many Blacks determine how these stories are being written? How many Asians? How many east Indians? How many south Asians?
…My role as mayor is being interpreted through the prisms of your realities and not mine. So when you write stories, you’re not writing stories for people who were almost homeless like me. You’re not writing stories for people who were arrested and beat up by police officers. You’re not writing stories for those who are dealing with high crime. You’re writing them from your prisms….. [Italics ours.]
Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people that look like me and say we are going to write stories based on the prisms that we have. That’s not what we’re getting. And that’s why I am covered the way I am covered. We really need to stop distorting the news…
The common media theme that he had failed to dislodge the entrenched progressives who run Albany doubtless irritated him. One headline actually read, “Eric beat up in crime fight,” and another, “Reform rollback hits Albany speed bump.” In fact, he emphasized that the meetings were pleasant and in many instances held among reminiscing old friends and colleagues. And he insisted that important progress was made on many other fronts which went largely unreported. But what does all that have to do with race and different prisms which the dictionary associates with “clarification or distortion afforded by a particular viewpoint”?
Surely the mayor appreciates that uppermost on the minds of most New Yorkers is the rampant crime that has virtually taken center stage in our city – particularly in minority neighborhoods. So, why would the media not highlight the refusal of the devout progressives running Albany to yield to him on critical issues of criminal justice reform? Wasn’t breaking that logjam the centerpiece of his recent campaign? Maybe he is right that there has been too little attention paid to some of his accomplishments, but isn’t that a function of media dynamics and not racial animus?
What is perhaps most disappointing is the mayor’s almost casual resort to the race card. Bail reform and other issues on the progressive/centrist divide are not about particular personalities but about policy perspectives. As we see it, the only way forward must be identifying and seizing opportunities. False flags of race will get us nowhere. We strongly backed Eric Adams for office as the only one on the political horizon who was capable of getting us out of the current morass of political radicalism. We expected and still hope for better from him.
