A Mandate to do Better: My Statement on Rep. Maloney’s Desperate Character Assassination
From Gettysburg to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka; from Martin Luther King’s 1968 murder to George’s Floyd’s today, our nation still bears the scars — and yes — open wounds, from a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and explicit and implicit racist public policies. The mass protests and civil unrest of the past two weeks make it clear: on the path to a more perfect union, we are at another necessary inflection point in our history.
We are witnessing a reckoning — and dismantling — of the accepted bias, subtle language, and both overt and discreet systems of oppression that are directly at odds with the spirit of the American experiment.
I am not a Black man. I have never walked in those shoes and it would be naive to assume I could ever fully understand the barriers African-Americans face in this country.
I am not a Black man. But I am a Brown man, and as such I know not simply the stereotypes and preconceptions minorities must conquer, I know what it is to be the other.
I am not a Black man, but I know Anti-Blackness is a far more sinister force in American society than anything I have faced. I know we must be unafraid to name racism where we find it and actively work against it. We need policies that undo and repair the unjust systems that prevent this nation from fulfilling its maximum potential.
On June 23rd, New Yorkers will have to choose which candidate they want to represent their party in congressional races this fall — which candidate they want to repair these unjust systems.
Earlier this week my opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination of New York’s 12th District, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, spent an estimated $100,000 falsely and disgustingly attacking my character.
Unfortunately being called “creepy” has happened to Black and Brown men in America — and frankly the world — for too long. It’s an amorphous word that intentionally lacks an accusatory action. All it points to, in this instance, and too many others, is the mere discomfort a powerful, white woman feels with the space that I am taking up. This is not a commentary on my policies, it’s not even an accusation: it’s an extreme assassination of my character, and a belief about my ability to exist in this political race.
She did not attack my 170-plus pages of original policy proposals. She did not respond to my request that she return donations she has received in previous campaigns from Donald Trump. Instead, she chose to attack me with a smear of who I am and how I exist. This is an odious rhetorical device meant to shut me up: this is supposed to disqualify and silence me, it’s supposed to remove me.
Suffice it to say: there is no one on the other side of her false claims. This manipulation is such that there is nothing to respond to.
When Warren’s campaign used the same Tinder tactics as my 2018 campaign, it was heralded as getting out the vote; when mine did, it was called “creepy.” Where the New York Times called the entry point innovative, my efforts were written up by tabloids without evidence of offense — that, again, is the rhetorical difference. It isn’t a comment on youth or fitness for office, it’s a comment on the wholly inappropriateness of my run — the audacity of my race. No doubt, I’m happy to be criticized for how we try to reach new Democrats, but let’s make it consistent. If it’s not consistent, it’s another baseless attack.
To be fair, I knew the reputation of the incumbent before the race began. Three years ago ahead of my first campaign, I was warned by people in the political sphere not to run because Maloney “plays dirty.” Last year, one would-be challenger told me that she was not going to run because “nobody comes out clean in a race with her.” And in three years of running against her, this has been true time and time again.
Her spokesman’s first-ever reference to me told me to “go work in the vineyards.” Maloney and her surrogates have referred to me as a “predator” (another word choice with a deeply racist history) more than once. They have consistently called me a carpetbagger — a term for a person or people who move frequently, despite the fact that I have lived in New York City since 2006 when I came for law school. Her team has consistently used the phrase “he’s not from here” to imply that because I’ve lived elsewhere, this isn’t my home. In reality, part of my childhood was spent in the New York area, while my immigrant father worked as an overnight engineer for the MTA. It’s true that parts of my childhood were also spent in Indiana and Mississippi, but the fact is that immigrants are never “from here” or from anywhere — my parents moved around the world to seek opportunity, and moved their first two decades in America.
It can’t be overstated that this language is meant to otherize. It deigns to define me as foreign, an outsider, and attempts to both strip me of my identity as well as my claim to home. It’s an intensely powerful rhetorical device used often by Republicans surrounding a host of issues from immigration to the social safety net. It is beneath the dignity of the office Maloney holds, and it has no place in Democratic leadership.
In my three years of running against Rep. Maloney, she’s attempted to take down my family, my character, my sense of home. I have only criticized her policies. And frankly, it’s deserved.
Rep. Maloney voted for the devastating 1994 crime bill and stated, “It’s the best news for New York City to come out of Washington since before Ronald Reagan took office” referring to a provision that allowed the Federal Government to pay for the cost of incarcerating undocumented immigrants in city jails. In 1997, she voted to toughen criminal penalties for juveniles, in 1998, she voted for a bill to increase penalties including making the death penalty available in gang investigations. In 2013, Maloney said that former Bloomberg NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, a fervent supporter of stop-and-frisk, was “uniquely qualified” for the job of Department of Homeland Security Secretary. And as recently as 2010, Representative Maloney used the N-Word on the record and was rebuked by Rev. Sharpton for it. We need to look at the entire picture of a person’s record and their representation — the subtle attacks and the simultaneous systemic pushes together.
But these tactics — this otherizing, these systemic allowances — also have a trickle-down effect.
Last election day I woke up excited to see my name on the ballot for the first time, but on my way to the polls, I passed my campaign signs covered in Swastikas. A few weeks ago I was at the Union Square Farmers Market when a man recognized and approached me to say that he was voting for Maloney, and I should “go back to where I came from” because that I wanted to fill this country with “Hindustanis.”
It isn’t just her constituents who are impacted by her racist mischaracterizations of me: my interns and staffers have faced countless slurs due to their association with my campaign. These are the tactics that disenchant politically-minded young progressives, who might otherwise pursue office and make a substantive difference in society. These are the tactics of a representative who is out of touch and no longer represents the Democratic politics of today. They are below the belt. They are anti-intellectual.
They are Trumpian.
And if we’re willing to name the racially-charged subtext and dog-whistle comments of Donald Trump and those of his ilk — why would we lower the standard for our Democratic representatives?
But this is not about me. This is not even about my bid for Congress. This is about the refusal to be intimidated, to be mischaracterized.
The story of America is inextricably linked to the contributions of its minority populations. Blacks, Latinx, and Asian-American immigrants were crucial to building the infrastructure of this country. Navajo code-talkers were pivotal to the U.S. victory in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The first man to die in service of American independence, Crispus Attucks, was of African and Native-American descent.
Make no mistake. Black Americans have borne the brunt of America’s institutional systemic prejudices. Full stop. What we have learned in the past two weeks is the time has finally come for that marginalization to end. The time has come for the system to break, the othering to be named, the silencing to be stopped. The time has come for us to rely on what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
As Democrats, as New Yorkers, as Americans, we need to do better than this.
And on June 23, we must.
