If you're gonna ask a question, don't point at me and
don't be disrespectful to me.
I'm the mayor of this city and
treat me with the respect that I deserve to be treated.
I'm speaking to you as an adult, don't stand in front like you treated someone
that's on the plantation that you own.
>> A few weeks ago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams weaponized his race in order
to shut down a tenants rights activist who demanded answer on rent hikes for
rent-stabilized buildings.
Now, she's actually speaking up.
But before we get to what she has to say, here's how that entire exchange went down.
>> Why are we
having?
>> Okay, first, if you're gonna ask the question, don't point at me and
don't be disrespectful to me.
I'm the mayor of this city and
treat me with the respect that I deserve to be treated.
I'm speaking to you as an adult, don't stand in front like you treated someone
that's on the plantation that you >> So obviously,
by saying that she is treating him as if she owns the plantation,
he's implying that she's racist, that she's being racist,
when in reality, she is an 84-year-old tenants rights activist.
She has been a tenants rights activist since the 1970s, and
she is asking a legitimate question to a man in a position of power,
a man who happens to be the mayor of the largest city in the United States.
Power dynamic is very clear there, Eric Adams is a powerful man.
With that said, he decided to double down on his statements later.
And so here's what he said in a radio interview quote,
my mom made it clear never allow someone to be disrespectful to you.
That woman disrupted a meeting where all the participants were
acting respectfully and cordially to get their issues heard.
She disrupted that, and then she was degrading on how she communicated with me.
I'm not going to allow civil service to be disrespected, and
I'm not going to be disrespected as the mayor of the city.
Well, as the mayor of the city, you are a public servant who is supposed to
look out for the best interests of your constituents.
But in this case, he didn't like the fact that he was being called out on
something that is affecting the lives of a diverse group of people number one,
and also elderly people who live in these rent-stabilized units who rely
on a fixed income.
So rent hikes are absolutely devastating for them.
Now, I wanna get to the woman that he shut down and
what she has to say about all of this in just a moment.
But before I do, Jank, what are your thoughts about him doubling down after he
got criticized for weaponizing his race the way he did?
>> Yeah, no, I can't stand it.
So, look, you wanna stand up to someone and say, hey,
treat me with a little bit of respect.
You do that with people above you, right, or at the same level.
So, for example, in that same New York City, the last mayor, Bill de Blasio,
I'm sorry, but it sticks out for me and then I can't get past it.
When he was doing a press conference,
a bunch of the cops turned their backs on him during the press conference, right?
And then there was this slowdown in New York where basically the cops weren't
doing their jobs, I'd have fired the hell out of them.
And I would have said, are you trying to disrespect forget me.
But the voters and the citizens of this city where you're gonna say your job is to
keep them safe and you're not gonna do that?
No, you're fired, okay?
And so Adams could do that with other powerful people like his donors,
is he gonna do that?
My guess is he's not gonna do that.
But when you pick on a citizen and someone who's trying to stick up for
people who are having trouble paying the rent and
who's making an excellent point, no, that's not the time that you say,
I'm an important politician, you lowly person should respect me.
You, on the other hand I should no, you're her representative, right?
It's your job to represent her interest, not your interest when you're the mayor.
>> Now the 84-year-old woman happens to be a Holocaust survivor,
her family fled during the Holocaust, and her name is Jeannie Debno and
she's the president of the Riverside Edgecomb Neighborhood Association.
She wrote a piece in Newsweek detailing what had happened during that interaction,
but also what she stands for and what she's trying to accomplish.
So I want to give her a voice on our platform and
share some excerpts from her piece with you.
She writes, this community is mainly Latino,
with most of the people coming from the Dominican Republic.
It is a low-income community, and
the people who do have jobs work in low-paying jobs, like home attendants.
This year and last, Mayor Eric Adams's Rent Guidelines Board has imposed crushing
rent increases which will inevitably result in evictions and more homelessness.
I wanna also quickly note that Eric Adams tried to kind of brush this off as like,
I have nothing to do with this, like the rent increases, there's nothing I can do,
there's nothing I can do.
But remember, he's the one who appoints the individuals who are part of this
government entity making decisions about rent hikes.
He could absolutely apply pressure and essentially maybe even offer an ultimatum.
He's the one who gave them their positions to begin with to say that he has
absolutely no impact, has no influence is ridiculous to say the least.
But nonetheless, she continues to write in her piece in Newsweek.
Now, in addition to the 5% rent increase passed last year,
this year the RGB passed a 3% for one-year lease,
a 2.75% for the first year, and a 3.2% raise in rent for
the second year of a two-year lease, okay?
Now, she then addresses the interaction she had with Adams,
writing that my initial reaction to his plantation owner remark was
amazement that he would say such a stupid thing.
No one from his team apologized to me either at the meeting or since.
I do not need any apology.
My message to the mayor now is simply, don't run for
reelection, make way for someone who supports New Yorkers.
And finally, someone named Michael Hollingworth,
who happens to be a Rent Justice Coalition organizer, he also contributed to
that Newsweek piece, and I really appreciated his voice as well.
He writes that Adams's casting of Jeannie as a white Karen disrespecting
a black mayor was a clumsy attempt to use race as a way of skirting accountability.
And it is becoming a tired tactic by too many elected officials,
especially when you consider that 76% of rent-stabilized tenants
are nonwhite, per New York City housing and vacancy survey data.
>> Yeah, so I was gonna comment on that, too.
So, look, we have significant racial issues in this country, but
what's also real and driving me crazy is when the elites use race as a shield.
So, hey, I'm gonna do something I'm gonna increase your rents, and
working-class people can't afford it, and mainly it affects minorities, but
race is a shield, right?
You're a plantation.
Well, okay, now this gets stupid real quick because she's a Holocaust survivor,
are we gonna have a contest here?
This is ridiculous, okay?
And you can't be the boy who cried wolf,
because then you do massive damage to the overall cause.
So when you're going around saying, this 84-year-old Holocaust survivor,
mainly representing working-class and Dominican tenants,
is being racist against me by having a perfectly legitimate complaint about rent.
Well, then, when someone has actual race issues, which there's tons of in America,
people are not gonna believe them.
They're gonna be like, yeah, like the mayor of New York, right?
Yeah, that Holocaust survivor is bullying you, right,
because of the fact that nobody can pay the rent in New York.
And it makes it look ridiculous, and a lot of people in power love that trick,
whatever their particular identity is, no,
you can't criticize me, I'm of a certain identity.
Well, sorry, that's not working for us at all anymore.
I don't care, we all have different identities.
You represent black people in this country and you fight for them, great I love you.
You use the fact that you're black to skirt responsibility,
hell no, sorry, no deal.