Many Black Americans have a friend or relative like Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York. We have uncles who bring up the progressive benefits of Black Lives Matter in the same breath as the conservative talking points about Black-on-Black crime. We have relatives who are cops or former cops who do not want the police defunded nor loved ones stopped, frisked and mistreated by officers. We have friends who are deeply suspicious of the system and come up with their own ways to deal with it — in Mr. Adams’s case, proposing that his brother head up his security operation to keep him safe.
But for other New Yorkers, Mr. Adams is a political curiosity, elusive, and they are not sure how to view him after his first month on the job.
What makes Mr. Adams hard to pin down is what makes him so interesting: He is offering a new model for how Black leadership can operate in a predominantly white political system — leadership that is simultaneously progressive, moderate and conservative.
This is not to say the mayor is confused: He has been and continues to be a savvy politician. I’m saying that Mr. Adams isn’t easily placed on the traditional left-right spectrum, which has been perplexing to the news media and to many white New Yorkers.
Yet his approach to politics is familiar to many Black Americans. Living as a Black person in America means facing hard truths; it sometimes requires holding two conflicting ideas in mind. Mr. Adams has tapped into the duality of being Black in New York City: Many Black neighborhoods are simultaneously underpoliced and overpoliced. Mr. Adams’s willingness to work with the police while also identifying the systemic inequities within the department contributes to a leadership ideology that may be off-putting to some, but that makes perfect sense to many Black New Yorkers.
Too often Americans settle for cookie-cutter politicians with familiar political viewpoints. Mr. Adams is clearly idiosyncratic — a mayor who took his first paycheck in cryptocurrency; who stands shoulder to shoulder with the police union president and Trump supporter Patrick Lynch but also was tacitly endorsed by his progressive predecessor, Bill de Blasio; who once displayed drowned rats on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to bring awareness to the infestation in housing projects. He prides himself on straight talk, a hands-on approach, and loyalty to those loyal to him (no matter their past transgressions).
In his style, Mr. Adams is in many ways the opposite of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who won the mayoralty in 1989 thanks to his “gorgeous mosaic” — a diverse and relatively elite citywide coalition. Mr. Adams built a diverse coalition throughout the five boroughs, too, but it was slightly more ethnic and less affluent. He won the Democratic mayoral primary last year with 50.4 percent of the vote after eight rounds of the new ranked-choice voting system — a process that, interestingly, yielded a moderate leader in a seemingly progressive city. His early approval ratings show support from New Yorkers across racial lines.
Critiques of mayors are brutal, and those of Black mayors even more so. Mr. Adams does not have it easy. He is trying to confront a life-or-death issue for all New Yorkers, one that Black New Yorkers know particularly well: gun violence and public safety. The testing of Mr. Adams has begun, a testing of what it means to be a Black leader in America today.
Mr. Adams’s Black constituents want safe streets without police abuse, equitable housing rates without the crippling effects of gentrification, and schools that embrace cultural competency for Black students. Black Americans remained in urban centers when white flight and middle-class flight were rampant, when cities were under-resourced and ignored. When Mayor Adams meets with President Biden on Thursday, he will serve as a representative not only of large cities but also of the diverse Black communities that still reside in these urban centers. He does so as a Black man leading the largest city in the nation and only its second Black mayor — out of 110.
Mr. Adams has a unique opportunity to take a new approach to public safety. He is attempting to have multiple conversations simultaneously: short and long term, with Black and non-Black communities, with those feeling overpoliced and those feeling underpoliced. This is not scattershot governance. Mr. Adams is attempting to establish himself as a “both/and” leader — one who sees the ills plaguing New York from the perspective of being both a Black man and a police officer.
Mr. Adams believes the N.Y.P.D. is and should be the first line of defense against gun violence. But he needs to be especially careful about ramping up his more draconian measures lest it lead to a return to the Giuliani era, when efforts to “clean up New York” involved cruel and racist tactics that destroyed communities, calcified distrust in the police, and punished a generation of young Black and Latino boys with minimal cause.
Mr. Adams knows this. Part of what has made him successful in his previous roles as Brooklyn borough president and state senator was his understanding of the N.Y.P.D.’s systemic flaws, so he must also be aware that the current iteration of the department is ill equipped to support communities trying to curb gun violence. As Mr. Adams attempts to police the city in a manner that is both forward-looking and cognizant of its racialized past, I would implore him to work closely with community-based organizations with proven track records.
I do not envy Mr. Adams in his new role. But I am rooting for him. I love two things inherently — Black people and cities — and I believe Mr. Adams does as well. After two decades in public service, Mr. Adams understands the needs of Black New Yorkers better than most. He is inheriting a city that must grapple with a seemingly never-ending pandemic, school inequities, public safety problems, housing insecurities and so much more.
As he begins his term, I hope New Yorkers will remember the words of President Lyndon Johnson: “When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.”
Christina Greer (@Dr_CMGreer) is a political scientist at Fordham University. She is a political analyst at TheGrio and a co-host of the podcast “FAQ.NYC”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
