NYC Mayor Eric Adams, the Uses of Haiti & the Black United Front
In the postcolonial states of the Caribbean, we are accustomed to living in communities composed overwhelmingly by people of color who toil under a Black (or occasionally Indian) political class that collaborates eagerly with US empire.
In New York City, Caribbean diasporic people differently constitute a noteworthy minority who must contend with white supremacy and anti-black racism. Yet we often live in diasporic enclaves and neighborhoods that affirm and sustain our shared heritage in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, and New Jersey. These communities are not disconnected from the politics of the region and the ruling classes of our nations and territories in the Caribbean. Recently, the ratification of a Transitional Presidential Council revealed that all Haitian elites who aspire to power have joined with other Caribbean rulers in defining their “national security” as subordinate to what US imperialists approve and what global capital is willing to fund.
Many of us have mobilized against racism, war, and empire in New York City. But we also find our would-be comrades repeatedly supporting Black politicians of the Democratic Party, the left block of capital, under the pretense that we will be empowered in this way. Caribbean people have repeatedly been shepherded into this mistaken approach. But at this moment of danger we must spotlight the latest phase of the search for self-directed emancipation of Haiti.
The Coalitions Behind the Critique of Misleadership
Many critics will make a big show of denouncing “misleadership” in the Black and Caribbean communities. The truth of the matter is even more elemental. The terms on which we are instructed to discuss “coalition building” and “Black unity” subordinates us to those who justify our conquering at home and abroad. Many facilitate our exploitation by sustaining a loyal “activist” opposition that purports to stand up to the misleaders of CARICOM and the US Democratic Party. But this activist charade only pretends to lead an impending confrontation with the state when in fact they are partners with it.
Now, there may be layers to this. One activist voice sides with the Mayor; one condemns him. One activist decries another as inauthentic or misleading. But the fact remains, all function within the Democratic Party and its imperial cultural apparatus. These include Black Marxists and cultural nationalists for capitalism, essentially activists for their faction of hierarchical government. Where coalitions for Black unity include Black politicians and police, whether primarily led by Haitian and Caribbean people or African Americans, this is how insurgent rebellion and mass democratic self-directed mobilization is betrayed.
‘US Out of Haiti’ — Says Haitian Political Forces Funded by US Empire
Similarly, in the Haitian homeland. Almost everyone shouting “US Out of Haiti,” except obscure individuals and small groups, can be documented as a paid functionary of the US at one time or another. They serve as lobbyists to the imperialists in Washington, directing their energies toward petitioning legislators in the Congressional Black Caucus or the faux left “squad” to adopt a gentler form of Empire. There is no room for coalition with those who denounce Washington only to break bread with its purportedly activist lawmakers and functionaries.
The lack of integrity of these aspiring rulers of various parties who disagree among themselves, from Guy Phillipe to Jean Bertrand-Aristide, often function like a jack-in-the-box. They are elevated, torn down, and propped up again by the US empire cyclically. But they don’t seem to mind. For no matter what they preach or project they do not believe in a future where Haitian toilers directly govern our homeland. When have they last spoken of the Haitian people themselves? When have they last spoken to the people of Haiti rather than their friends on Capitol Hill? And so now those who were mortal enemies — such as the Montana Accord and Famni Lavalas — are now partners in the imperialists’ stage-managed transition for Haiti.
It might seem odd that those who unite to denounce systemic oppression and rally for solidarity against our shared burdens could spread disinformation and misinformation to bewilder us. But it happens far more than we realize. Still, with more precise historical knowledge and clarification of our political thought, we can advance our struggles to be more self-directed so more power can go to commoners than those who wish for coveted positions above our Haitian community. If we know that in Jamaica, Trinidad, Antigua, and Guyana there are activists for the government who are functionaries for the political party that claims to be progressive, anti-colonial nationalist, or for labour in some bewildering way, we should be able to see how this has perennially functioned in the NYC metro area and among Haitians in the homeland.
Rejuvenating the Police Assault on Black People
Recently, Mayor Eric Adams, a career Black police officer in the city, has come under fire from African American and Caribbean people for his rejuvenation of the legitimacy of the police state in New York City. This includes a return to targeted harassment and neglect of prisoners.
Olayemi Olurin, movement lawyer and political commentator, has exposed Eric Adams not only revived police units that were disbanded in 2020 for their disproportionate abuse against black and brown New Yorkers; he revived stop and frisk. Since he became mayor, 97% of all stops and searches have been on Black and Latino New Yorkers.
Olurin further underlines that what’s really worth noting is that $17 million is the amount of money Eric Adams cut from re-entry programs for people at Rikers Island prison, only for New Yorkers to have to shell out the exact same amount of money to pay for NYPD’s misconduct settlements. Is Mayor Adams, who received votes from anti-racists and racists alike (just like the imperialist Barack Obama), really a bad guy? It depends on our political worldview and how we see strategy for empowering African Americans, the Caribbean Diaspora and the Haitian homeland.
Playing Around with Haiti Solidarity
Mayor Eric Adams recently has played around with press conferences to express solidarity with Haiti’s burdens. He gathers with Rev. Al Sharpton for prayer vigils with representatives of the Haitian community, to reflect on the plight of Haiti. Adams even suggested the increasingly chaotic New York City feels somewhat like the Haitian capital, Port au Prince. Now Adams rallies this “community sentiment” in harmony with the UN/US policing action in Haiti which is in fact a consensus to militarily invade Haiti to stabilize it.
At this rally, Adams and Sharpton suggested they gathered together to address the “outrageous humanitarian crisis in Haiti.” In contrast, to focus on the Middle East and Ukraine, there has been a “reign of bedlam and terror” that has gone unaddressed. And many Haitians in New York City have relatives suffering in Haiti at this time. “It has not been addressed in the way we feel it should be” — these false Haitian community leaders behind Adams and Sharpton wish to suggest. For those that know dread and trauma but little of global power politics, this seems like a reasonable and empathetic projection.
In fact, it is an endorsement of American empire’s relationship to Haiti, the UN/US invasion and policing action of Haiti, combined with silences on the US empire’s repeated destabilization of that Caribbean country.
Brutal Coercion Comes in the Name of Restoring Peace and Humanity
The trouble is, at home and abroad, the forces of imperial destabilization come in the name of bringing “peace” and “humanitarian” initiative. And domestically the police tell us they are there to play catch and dance with children, help old ladies across the street, and help get cats out of trees. This is how the state, the monopoly of the means of violence and coercion, functions.
The forces of empire try and often do maintain relations with all sides; the empire’s cultural apparatus even funds those who say ‘US Out of Haiti.’ And so a rally that appears to raise awareness in fact gathers together Haitian elites who pose as community leaders who have always been propped up by American empire and been friends with certain Black police (as they may object to the police that are not nice). They strive to undermine any mass democratic mobilization or insurgent rebellion. Peculiarly, Black militants, one would think we meant white imperialists, who walk with the police also have strident sympathy for the Black propertied.
Defining Fidelity as Containing Insurgent Rebellion
While campaigning and after attaining the mayor’s office, Eric Adams, reminded the Haitian community in New York City that he did not just show up and ask for their vote. That he had been ‘true’ to the Haitian community. What did he mean by this?
In the summer of 1997, two years after co-founding the advocacy group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, then NYPD police lieutenant Eric Adams found himself catching flak in the outrage over the beating and sodomizing of Abner Louima, the Haitian American who was wrongly arrested outside a night club, and brutalized within an inch of his life, by racist cop Justin Wolpe and others. This happened in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, and this was among the most horrific cases of police brutality New York City had ever seen — and that’s saying something.
Black Capitalists and Black Police as the Voice of Rising Haitians and African Americans Who Have Had Enough of Degradation?
Eric Adams pled for the officers involved to face charges, while organizing marches in partnership with Haitian leaders. More than 20 years later he stood, as Brooklyn borough president, in a designation ceremony for the Little Haiti business and commercial district in Flatbush including with the Haitian American Business Network (HABNET).
Now when the Louima assault occurred (August 9, 1997) Adams was in the middle of a 22 year law enforcement career as a NYC police officer and subway cop (they are two separate forces). That year his advocacy work put him into close collaboration, facilitating links between NYC police and certain Haitian American activists. Adams as politician has also been attentive to Caribbean creole/Haitian Kreyol speakers, particularly youth and students, who need special support in public school education
Claude Pierre, a member of the Haitian American Law Enforcement Fraternal Organization (HALEFO) and NYPD detective began his career in the same precinct that the Louima assault happened. Protests in front of the precent headquarters took place weekly through the fall of that year.
Pierre met Adams at this time, and remembers him as a vocal critic of how the police interacted with Black and Caribbean communities. This is without a doubt true. But where Pierre underlined that Adams had always pursued links between social justice and police functions this should cause us to pause.
Cops who Affirm Haitian History and Social Justice?
Adams as borough president, before becoming mayor, always took part in Haitian flag day celebrations. His affirmation of Haitian history, culture, and concerns as mayor is nothing new.
Now there are factions of American empire, debates within American empire. There are even battles not simply between the Democrats and Republicans but within the Democrats themselves as to what US foreign policy should be. And if we don’t grasp that, we don’t grasp how the anti-imperialist critics of ‘misleadership’ can in fact be functionaries of the empire itself. Further, we can’t simply listen to apparently strident activists talk about who is a traitor when they embed themselves in the imperial state and the party of the left block of capital itself.
‘Progressive’ Misinformation and Disinformation about Foreign Affairs
Whether such activists think American foreign policy is racist, deceptive, hypocritical, or tragic these propositions condemn themselves. Can US foreign policy oppose racism and empire? Can it be honest and transparent? Can it be morally consistent and sound? Is it the fate of critics of US foreign policy that they regret what the American public doesn’t know. For if they did, they could write and call their Congressman? This is the pattern of thinking encouraged by usually non-profit foundation paid activists for the government.
And what of the activists who attach themselves to other blocks of capital and police states in the world telling their public whose consciousness they wish to raise that Russia and China are allies of the Caribbean when in fact they betrayed Haiti, and in fact agree with the US coordinated UN invasion of Haiti? Those who condemn the West, perhaps taking money from Russia or China, are also often embedded within the Democratic Party and its cultural apparatus.
Mayor Adams and the Black United Front
One way Mayor Adams shields himself from criticism that he is betraying the Black community and renewing the police state’s assault on Black and Latino people is by reminding that he was one of the original voices for reforming policing in New York City. And he is not telling a lie.
Most critics of institutional racism and oppressive systems, showing a basic illiteracy or opportunism, prefer that they were in charge above society instead. That they could replace immoral leaders with ethical personalities and policies. If individual politicians and policy makers transform things than institutions and systems are not inherent oppressive. This is the ridiculous shell game that explains the relationships between people who condemn systems and in fact work for them. The old sociological idea that Black people ‘can’t be racist because they don’t have power’ continues to cover up who the Black led police state kills in many cities since the early 1970s. If police murder and mass incarceration continues to be disproportionate, and this is the main indicator of institutional racism, then we need to face the reality of the post-civil rights, post-black power world.
In fact, Mayor Adams was a type of ‘activist-cop’ that maintained an alternative police union for Black patrolmen. Further, he was part of the original Black United Front in New York City led by Rev. Herbert Daughtry. This Black United Front (including many from the December 12th Movement and Patrice Lumumba Coalition) included activist personalities like Sonny Carson, Viola Plummer, Jitu Weusi, Father Lawrence Lucas, Herman Ferguson, Coltrane Chimurenga, Elombe Brath, Alton Maddox, C. Vernon Mason, and the earlier plumper Rev. Al Sharpton. Adams also openly made alliances with Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Certainly Amiri Baraka’s circle of activists bridged Newark, New Jersey and New York City. His son Ras Baraka is now Mayor of Newark.
The Black United Front in New York City accomplished some significant mobilizations in protest of white racist and fascist attacks on Black people in the 1980s and 1990s. Those who struggled in that era remember the killing of Eleanor Bumpers in the Bronx, Bensonhurst (the murder of Yusuf Hawkins), Howard Beach (the murder of Michael Griffith), the Central Park Five. (One of the wrongly accused of the Central Park Five, Yusuf Salam, has been elected to the NYC City Council). The 1997 assault of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima and the 1999 killing of the West African immigrant Amadou Diallo would come later and many responses to racist and fascist attacks in between. The 1998 Million Youth March, while far short of a million and not a march, impressively rallied thousands and confronted the stridently racist Mayor Giuliani administration in Harlem. Nevertheless, all the while Eric Adams and the Black cops who ‘cared’ were always in close dialogue with this social motion.
Mayor Adams Didn’t Lose His Way, He was Always and Still Is An Open Black Cop in the Black United Front
Now it is sort of false for Mayor Adams to suggest that ‘when [he] was a young man he took part in the Black United Front.’ For this is to imply that when Mayor Adams was younger, he was an idealist, a romantic, a militant, who almost lost his way associating with extreme or irresponsible personalities. But through unpredictable situations and ambiguous circumstances he somehow became the second African American Mayor of New York City. This is total nonsense.
It is to be a political amateur who has no idea how the Black United Front (BUF) functions at all. The BUF is a gathering of Christians, Muslims, socialists, communists, Pan Africanists and anti-imperialists who function one step inside and one step outside the Democratic Party, an imperialist party. While every formation that has ever called itself a Black United Front in the US cities has not always been openly connected, for each city has its own personalities, these coalitions are formed in such a way for mass mobilization but also containment for elite brokerage and ethnic patronage. New York’s Rev. Herbert Daughtry did project a National Black United Front with linkages in Illinois, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and California among other sections of the U.S.
Very often otherwise militant personalities are exposed as on the payroll of the Democratic Party, its mainstream politicians, and the cultural apparatus that pays people to get out the vote and make ‘militant’ or ‘progressive’ criticism. When the very civil and gentlemanly Mayor David Dinkins was in office, the first African American mayor, it was revealed that Sonny Carson, a long time Brooklyn Black radical was on the party payroll to mobilize the vote. Recently Mayor Eric Adams attended activist Viola Plummer’s funeral. This was not a respectful official visit; there was a long time linkage. The Final Call reported that Adams stood with Plummer’s family members before her casket. It was recalled Plummer always denounced those in power who betrayed the Black community. Who have power above society and are friends of Black and Caribbean toilers?
Increasingly, a significant number of Black people in coveted positions above society were seen as defenders, not betrayers of the masses by activist voices. This viewpoint could only have been sustained by militant activists significantly responsible for mobilizing Black people to place these politicians above society.
We must be clear one can be a member of a Communist or Pan African or Black Nationalist organization and still be a functionary of, and recipient of patronage from, the Democratic Party in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Jackson, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Oakland. Clash! kindly asks people not to quarrel with us in a cheap fashion — a list can easily be made.
People can easily say “I am not a member of the Democratic Party.” Experienced observers of community politics know the reality of the Black United Front, even if in the name of educating our people in politics, too few become perceptive and courageous enough to take initiative on their own. And that’s the whole point when we think about it.
When contemporary apparent Black radical alliances suggest that Adams and Sharpton are ‘scoundrels,’ that if they really wanted to express solidarity with Haiti, they would denounce the ‘help’ the U.S. has given Haiti, this is further disinformation in the name of consciousness raising. For the radical critics have participated time and again in coalitions with Black mayors, police, and those with imperial funding.
Aristide to Kagame, Farmer to Clinton…
Further, most up to recently have supported quite openly Aristide’s Lavalas in Haiti, as an anti-imperialist force, that somehow has openly admitted in public forums and websites that they have built and sustained a university and hospital in the very midst of this horrific, traumatic, supposedly ungovernable chaos in Haiti. Their ties to Harvard University, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health who was partners also with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is well-known. Lavalas has been walking hand in hand with the Clintons for 20 years (even after the Clinton administration CIA funded FRAPH attacked Aristide’s government after the first restoration in 1994).
Speaking of the Harvard connection to US empire’s uses of Haiti, remember poor Claudine Gay, the feckless Haitian, that woman of color who a bunch of dopes cried tears for when she was insulted and manipulated out of her university president job? What kind of activists use ‘intersectional’ analysis to defend the legitimacy of imperialist functionaries?
Remember Claudine Gay and the ‘Activist’ Voices that Defended Her?
There will be no post-civil rights, post-colonial freedom movements if people such as Claudine Gay can’t be called names by the anti-racist, anti-imperialist masses. But just as with Barack Obama, white racists beat us to it, and so many thought we must defend the conquerors with our own name, image, and likeness as ‘our sisters and brothers.’ Functionaries of subversion of Haiti and the Caribbean are not our sister!
Genuine freedom movements remember and correct their mistakes. This means telling US imperial and police state functionaries of color to be thankful they still have some white racist friends left because we know they are not our friends.
We mention Aristide and Lavalas not as a result that we prefer another party or personality collaborating with empire. Rather, in order to restore Haitian popular and direct democracy (a heritage that goes back to the Haitian Revolution) we must clarify the mess and clear the ground so sincere fighters can take initiative against the grain of those who bewilder.
From Mayor Eric Adams to President Barack Obama there is a disturbing pattern to the Black United Front that goes back many years to Detroit’s Mayor Coleman Young, Chicago’s Harold Washington, Washington DC’s Marion Barry, and Philadelphia’s Mayor Wilson Goode. If one is really concerned about state repression of everyday Black people. When will members of the Black United Front take responsibility for electing and working with the police state that has killed ‘our people?’
An Activist Veil: The Most Efficient Strategy of Killing Black People
The Black United Front, a form of coalition politics, is always getting out the vote for Black capitalist politicians whose Black police kill Black people. Now a Caribbean person, who knows their homelands intimately, should be able to see this better than anyone. In fact, it is a very Caribbean strategy.
Still, in the center of American empire, here’s why it is a little different. When Caribbean politicians and their fake activists for the government do this, they tend to denounce white imperialism, rarely openly, perhaps subtly, with a little culture, a reference to history, while they are working with the current empire directly. That’s what post-colonial Caribbean regimes do.
There are No Genuine Militant Activists that Lobby the Imperial State
African American politics works a little differently. Most of the professional Pan Africanists and anti-imperialists work directly and indirectly for the cultural apparatus of the state in the heart of empire, peculiarly in NYC and Washington DC, where most embassies and government offices that deal with foreign affairs are found, disproportionately as lobbyists serving both the imperial state as advisors and the peripheral states they conquer.
Whether under the guise of non-profit foundations, trade union foreign policy fronts, or Black United Fronts, they mobilize angry and disenchanted people back into the system that they rally to decry. And people are paid as professional vote mobilizers to do this.
We Can’t Reconstruct Black Countries/Communities & American Empire
Where connected to Washington DC, they function as lobbyists for both the Congressional Black Caucus and their favorite African and Caribbean governments abroad. Meanwhile they claim to work at ‘policy institutes’ that nobody in the Imperial Government takes seriously.
There is also an opportunist fluidity. These activists claim to speak for ‘a nation within the nation’ (the Black Nation) and for ‘national reconstruction’ by which they mean the American nation. People who have attached themselves to Green New Deal rhetoric have particularly made this maneuver.
Against Spies but for the Police in Black activist coalitions?
Now Rev. Al Sharpton has been repeatedly accused to be an FBI informant in relation to the intersection of past Mafia management of professional entertainers. It has been manifestly clear that he wore a wire for the authorities. Black United Front activists have repeatedly suggested he was a spy or agent.
But the Black United Front included openly a Black police association led by Eric Adams. Nobody ever accused Adams of being a spy for the state. He openly worked for the police state. He was not a secret cop, he was an open cop. And this is how many ‘Black radicals’ think about politics. If they are going to teach Black people about politics, and not just light candles and have African costume parties cheapening our heritage, they have to explain to those with good instincts and aspiring understanding why this has been a repeated historical pattern. Genuine insurgent Black radicals are aware of it. Such observers of history and politics have educated some of us. It must come to an end.
It is a major creative conflict: The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program clearly wished to obstruct those working to build a Black United Front. And yet to this day many working for such a formation welcome Black police, correction officers, and security professionals. Who is deficient in understanding our history?
No Black People Called the Police ‘Pigs’ in Public During Jim Crow
Black United Fronts in various cities have openly embraced Black police officers, corrections officers, professional private security specialists, bail bondsmen and bounty hunters. Michele Alexander’s New Jim Crow book was openly endorsed on the cover by a Black police association — and was never criticized for the partnership this implied. Rarely has anyone publicly started a principled discussion about this.
No New Jim Crow, No COINTELSLOW
Actually, Adofo Minka, a Black activist lawyer, a public defender, and community organizer associated with Jackson, Mississippi and St. Louis, Missouri has written to expose the contradictions of the Black United Front, and the false framing of the present as a ‘New Jim Crow.’ He also has tried to uproot ‘Black girl magic’ affinities for Black women politicians and law enforcement who claim to be ‘progressive’ but are part of the forces of state repression and disinformation campaigns about what is empowerment. Minka has made it clear that the idea that within Black United Fronts there is internal debate but Black activists don’t wish to ‘air dirty laundry’ that might undermine ‘Black unity’ assumes that Black people can’t read and keep up with the mainstream and ‘progressive’ media that reports on what is actually going on. Ethical politics rarely happens behind the scenes; politics must face the public.
Why do Black Marxists, Pan Africanists, progressives, and anti-imperialist activists maintain these false coalition politics? Many have believed they were the governments in exile of the Black community. This had a certain resonance for many sincere liberation activists from the 1960s and early 1970s. But why does this approach continue to persist sixty years later? The truth is both African American and Caribbean politicos have used their pretense to cultural authenticity and identity to renew imperial American Exceptionalism. They have joined half the ruling class, not those who wish to make Anglo-America great again, but the elements of global capitalism that seek an affirmative action empire and an ethnically plural police state.
Repairing the Empire, Repairing the Periphery: National Security for All?
Whether Black Nationalists or Black socialists talk ‘Green New Deal,’ they conflate national reconstruction of the U.S. with building and developing the Black nation (remember ‘a nation within a nation’?) in the name of reparations. The CARICOM governments, talking reparations, have done the same thing with American empire. They are both working for ‘national security’ in Haiti and across the Caribbean under the rubric of US imperial national security. And they are quite stridently open and stupid about it. These political forces really believe the Black and Caribbean masses are deaf, dumb, and blind. That African Americans or Haitians will never catch on. Their falsification campaigns are catching up to them.
The betrayal of African American insurgency against the police from 2014–2020 has been a concurrent development with Caribbean police states openly collaborating with US empire for the last 20 years. And the Haitian and Caribbean insurgency is struggling to clarify itself. This is the next development in political thought in the African world. For no matter how much Haitian and Caribbean people hate ‘white imperialism’ and no matter how much CARICOM governments collaborate openly with Britain in their reparations campaign, while Britain still has open colonies from Bermuda to Anguilla in the Caribbean, Caribbean history cannot be set back to ‘a New Jim Crow’ or an old white colonialism. Freedom in the Caribbean, and quiet as its kept also in New York City, must be conquered by an impending confrontation with Black rulers above society.
Lies About Black Unity and Whitey
Both among Haitian and Caribbean people and African Americans, the leaders of official ‘movement politics’ are still handpicked by the state and capitalists to misdirect insurgent and democratic impulses among the Black masses. Very often this misdirection doesn’t appear in the form of a Black Republican or conservative. Rather in the form of an insurgent militant in dialogue with the cops while critiquing other activists. We believe the conflicting tendencies in the Black and Caribbean freedom movement need to be clarified; debates within our radical traditions are good. But nobody can openly defend collaboration with the police state and imperialists and so they tell us lies about ‘Black unity’ and ‘whitey’ while the wealthiest and most powerful whites are always one step away in dialogue with, and handing out money to, the fakers.
In order to grasp this properly it would be wrong to suggest that in most cases there are spies carrying out conspiracy among Black people. Instead, we impose thought crimes on ourselves when we pursue any form of Black Power in the name of seeking coveted positions above society, elite patronage, ethnic brokerage, and friendship with the police.
Post-civil rights New York, and post-colonial Haiti and the Caribbean, can only be characterized as ‘a New Jim Crow’ if we think Black may be beautiful but not very historical. During the urban uprisings of 1964–1968 and through most of the 1970s ordinary Black people began to call the police ‘pigs’ on the street. This was not a widespread trend from 1896–1964 (the Age of Jim Crow).
From Michele Alexander to Eric Adams, there has been an effort to legitimate Black law enforcement in the Black community as a counter-insurgency strategy. This is consistent with the search to define diversity, equity and inclusion as the right to be a boss and manage servile Black lives. A critique of ‘respectability politics’ that openly collaborates with the police state and the left block of capital paving the way for more gender equality among hierarchies, including activist groups sponsored by the imperial state, both in New York City and the Caribbean, is a veil for continued brutality and coercion.
Police Critique Police: Its Meaning for the Uses of Haiti
Eric Adams has been criticized for his inability to contain the post 2020 uprising against police brutality rise in crime in New York City. ‘Progressive’ activists for the government say what uptick in crime? After every historical insurgency against the police state, where the police retreat for a time, there is an uptick in crime. There is no need for community organizers to lie about it. Those who are for popular and direct self-government need to fight the police but also address many difficult issues if the police will be abolished. The 2020 uprising exposed a lack of clarity on this where ‘abolish the police’ was subverted toward ‘defund the police’ and ‘community control of the police’ by the activists for the government.
Former Police Commissioner under Mayor Dinkins (1992–1994), Ray Kelly, has criticized Adams approach to crime, and his recent comparison of chaos in Port au Prince with New York City’s present condition. Who is Ray Kelly? Not only was he police commissioner of the city previously but functioned under both the Clintons and Bushes to train police forces who would be lackeys of US empire in Iraq and — wait for it — in Haiti.
The last time the UN invaded Haiti to police the chaos that US empire started and stirred was 1994–1995. Responsible for ending human rights abuses among the police force, Kelly was part ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ where President Clinton restored Aristide to office.
The fact is tens of thousands of Haitian Americans in New York City and Miami mobilized for President Clinton to restore Aristide to power in 1994. And many of the Haitian coordinators of this mobilization were activist-lobbyists funded by USAID, but also communists embedded in the Democratic Party. We don’t mind communists against capitalism, but communists who are partners with an imperialist party?
Haitian and Caribbean people cannot regret the CIA subversion of regional sovereignty and legitimate activism funded by USAID. But CARICOM rulers haven’t learned. And the Caribbean is infested with fake activists for the government for two decades. Yet the time for compromising with barbarism and calling it a contribution to liberation is running out.
Kelly is no political amateur. He is also concerned with the humanity of Haitians he polices and contributes to containing and conquering. As a white male when he criticizes Adams, who in reality is his longtime colleague in the hierarchies of policing Black people in New York City and Haitians specifically, he is reinforcing the legitimacy of the Black led police state among Black people. And when supposed ‘radical’ activists criticize Adams, he continues to be attractive to the white racists (who think they are rational liberals) of the city who voted for him. Black police are very rational and show a commitment to opposing racism — haven’t you heard? But can we blame this sensibility only on white dunces?
Ray Kelly was also police commissioner again (2002–2013) under Mayor Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s police ‘stopped and frisked’ through three terms and then went across the country handing out money and offering affirmations to many members of the broad Black United Front, who like talking self-determination, and previously campaigned and condemned him for his justification of police murder and mass incarceration. Nothing like Black Power activists who get money and commendations from the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. They really know how to break their chains and rule — rule Black people in coalition with white imperialists.
The Black United Front, who embrace Haiti’s plight, in reality share a political party with both Kelly and Adams. Kelly and Adams, whatever their inter-office differences, are all in the same gang. It should be clear that the hierarchy of New York City police have great affinity for Haitians but not for the next Haitian Revolution at home or abroad.
The Historical Significance of Mayor Eric Adams
The historical significance of Mayor Eric Adams is he was an open cop in the Black freedom movement in New York City. This means a serious reassessment of the Black radical tradition as an archive of strategies needs to be made. Adams was among those who legitimated the presence of Black cops within the post-civil rights, post-Black Power era.
Adams worked to undermine Haitian American insurgency in response to the assault on Abner Louima. The ruling class of New York and the broader United States owes Mayor Adams a permanent debt of gratitude. He worked to save property relations from the insurgent rage in response to the assault on Abner Louima. He was less successful in response to the 2020 national risings against police murder.
Adams is now working, with other activists for the government, to justify US imperial invasion of Haiti and sponsorship of its elites. In every insurgent situation the most modernized and professional cops confront insurgent forces with ‘community policing’ to ‘dialogue’ with the discontented. ‘Social Justice’ has always been a framework meant to be shared with the police and Black people who rule above society.
Adams function as a police officer was to gather intelligence and befriend activists who can be bought off and made collaborators. There are Haitians in New York City with a long memory of how people who claimed to be community leaders collaborated with the Black police instead of unleashing and politically empowering insurgent and uncompromising forces to tear down the oppressive institutions that degraded us all. It reminds of coalitions that talk ‘activist’ ‘progressive’ and ‘militant’ but which work with the empire state to contain and disorient Black, Caribbean, and Haitian insurgency.
