Only weeks into the New York City (NYC) mayoral administration of Eric Adams, capitalism has revealed once again that Black politicians are on the front lines of fascist police terror and deadly living conditions for workers in NYC and around the world.  Police raids of Black youth in Brooklyn on January 4 followed by a massive fire killing at least 17 workers in the Bronx on January 9 prove the point.
 In Progressive Labor Party (PLP) we know that especially under the cover of a Black mayor, much like President Barack Obama as former president, our class must be more courageous than ever at our jobs and in our neighborhoods in calling out the atrocities committed by those with the same skin color and from the same “communities” that we come from.   
Eric Adams is no different. The capitalist warmongers running the Democratic Party need politicians like Adams in NYC and Ras Baraka in Newark, New Jersey, to play leading roles in keeping Black workers disciplined and submissive to the needs of an ever-more-volatile capitalist system.  
Politically-backed slumlords to blame for Bronx blaze
In the aftermath of the January 9 fire at Twin Parks North West Tower, Eric Adams invoked the age-old blame-the-victim mantra of “personal responsibility,” accomplishing  exactly what the flailing main imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class needs right now.
Adams blamed the deaths of children as young as four or five not on his firetrap landlord buddy Rick Gropper (NY Mag, 1/13, cityandstateny.com 1/12) but on Black immigrant workers themselves running for their lives and neglecting to shut doors that would have closed on their own if Gropper had properly maintained them. A tenant interviewed after the blaze put it best:
They’re sending up just enough heat to say they’re sending up heat, but it’s not enough to keep you warm, and if you don’t use a space heater, then you use your oven (NYPost, 1/10).
This is capitalism in a nutshell: the landlord’s disregard for safety protocols led to needless
death– what Freidrich Engels called “social murder.’”
Police raids terrorize Black youth
Days before the deadly Bronx fire, on January 4, the Adams gang set the stage for this new wave of social murder forced onto workers by increasing the tempo and intensity of New York Police Department (NYPD) raids targeting Black and Latin youth. Plainclothes ‘anti-crime’ units that murdered Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray and Saheed Vassell in Brooklyn have been reinstated by his administration (NYT, 1/5).
The bosses were forced to disband these units during the anti-racist protests following the death of George Floyd, but they quickly restored their brutal policies of shoot to kill once the protests subsided. Only communism can accomplish the goal that all workers seeking justice are fighting for: a world without any racist cops empowered to defend capitalist inequality.  
Raids, like the one on January 4 where 17 Black youth were arrested by the cops, rely on weak “guilt-by-association” conspiracy laws that use social media and cyberspace collaborations with law enforcement to round up workers by the hundreds. The newly appointed Black female NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell gives us a sense of the Big Fascist (see glossary, page 6)direction that the desperate ruling-class is headed in: “There will be more cases like this one, not just here in Brooklyn but in every borough” (Brooklyn DA/YouTube, January 10).
Sewell received high-grade training in counterterrorism with the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, so she is savvy enough to acknowledge the “lack of choice” Black youth face, but her actions speak louder than any words—for the youth aged 17-23 targeted in this raid (PIX 11, 1/4).
These Task Forces are responsible for a 20-year campaign of terror targeting Muslim communities with kidnap-style street arrests, summary deportation and targeted infiltration of community centers and houses of worship.
Whether it is Sewell’s compatriots persecuting Muslim workers or former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s over-decade-long “stop-and-frisk,” workers have suffered from racist political repression at the hands of NYC mayoral administrations.
In promising “more cases” Sewell is building on a high bar the NYPD set for fascist, repressive terror. Bloomberg’s stop-and-friskpractices recovered a paltry number of weapons (The Atlantic, 7/24/13) but terrorized a generation of Black and Latin youth (NYT, 1/5). As with stop-and-frisk, the Big Fascists’ aim to target gang members under the guise of Black conservative leadership is not safety; it is terror.    
Angry youth must join PLP to fight racist policing
Long-term investigations prove that city governments are aware of exactly which young people are in deepest crisis. Educators have similar insight, yet schools remain sites of repression and neglect for uncounted thousands.  
While the bosses forced youth into unsafe educational conditions during the pandemic, PLP supported student anger and protest in NYC and beyond (see page 3). Students at Brooklyn Tech high school (see letter, page 6) led the way for protests from Chicago to Boston with students standing up to capitalist failure in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. All we can expect from the bosses is a steady dose of aggressive policing in our schools modeled in the image of the Sewell/Adams regime.
Young people are in crisis, a crisis so deep that, for some, gangs appear to be their best option. But students don’t need street gangs or the gang in blue; they need PLP!  
Calls for more Black leaders for capitalism only feed the illusion that there is a version of capitalism that can work for us, and this has proven true from NYC to Newark to the working-class communities in the Caribbean and Africa where politicians meet angry youth with guns and state repression. “Community engagement” with the likes of Adams and Sewell is the kiss of death. Identity politics blinds us to this truth and hence is poisonous. The future of our youth is an afterthought for the ruling class Sewell and Adams front for.
Black youth, from Minneapolis to Baltimore to Ferguson and beyond, have led uprisings recently that rocked the world. The racist U.S. ruling-class tremble in fear at the potential explosive force which rests in the heart of their crumbling imperialist world order. Their great nightmare is our great hope. The leadership of Black workers and youth remain a key force for communist revolution.