In her article in The Guardian, Dericka Purnell explains that:

The North may not remember, but August 9 this year marked the twelfth anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri. That day, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [AOC] reassured an ABC News anchor that she, like other progressive politicians and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates, had “moved away” from statements made during the pandemic — particularly on police and prison abolition.

Pressed further, AOC explained:

I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke was crazy’ … especially during Covid, I think that the doors were open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down. And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I’m grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they’re campaigning on in this moment.

A few days later, Mamdani echoed her: “Sometimes what you believe in can change. I know there are some for whom they still believe in that. I’ve made very clear I do not believe in defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners.”

On Thursday, August 13, 2026, a coalition of community groups — Court Watch NYC, Drug Policy Alliance, Freedom Agenda, the Justice Committee, The Legal Aid Society, SURJ NYC, VOCAL-NY, and others — released a statement along with data from a week spent observing arraignment shifts across the five boroughs. The action was timed to Black August to illuminate how low-level, quality-of-life enforcement continues to harm Black, Latine, and low-income New Yorkers.

Over four days of observation, the coalition tracked more than 370 arraignments and found that 93 percent of those arraigned were people of color — 57 percent Black — with 58 percent of the charges being misdemeanors, including at least 137 for low-level offenses such as petty larceny and minor drug possession. More than fifty cases involved people dealing with mental illness, substance use disorders, or housing instability. Citing this data, the groups called on Mayor Mamdani to deliver the new approach to community safety he promised during his campaign.

On August 9, 2026, I spent the day calling and talking with front-line organizers who had risked their lives, their bodies, their homes, and their jobs during the Ferguson Rebellion. Many still carry PTSD from that period. That same day, I was watching AOC on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Her comments, and her laughter throughout the twenty-minute interview, caught me off guard. I rewatched it three times just to make sure I’d heard her correctly, and I felt it physically — like a menopausal hot flash. I asked myself why I had supported her: Because she is Puerto Rican? A woman? A millennial? Probably all three. But I should have known better than to extend a politician that kind of trust. As for Mamdani, I had already come to view him as anti-Black before this interview. A close friend and I have gone back and forth on this more than once — after one particularly intense conversation, we agreed that history would be the judge. Less than a year into office, he has already broken one of his central campaign promises on policing and community safety.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, your comments were not just anti-Black — they were dismissive, something waved off in the middle of a friendly interview. You need to own what you said, and Afro/Black Puerto Ricans and the broader Afro-Latinx community have every right to hold you accountable. Comments like these are part of why many African Americans assume all Puerto Ricans and other Latinoxpeople are anti-Black. By most reports, you are weighing a run for president in 2028 or for U.S. Senate from New York. You will not get there without the support of African American women and Afro-Latinx people. As of 2022, an estimated 6 million U.S. adults identified as Afro-Latino or Black Latinx, according to the Pew Research Center — about 2 percent of all U.S. adults and 12 percent of the adult Latino population, and a share that continues to grow. That is not a constituency any national candidate can afford to write off.

Ask Black or Brown people in this country what they fear most, and in nearly every case you will hear the same answer: police and ICE. Of every issue you could have waved off as something said in a difficult moment, you chose to minimize the one tied to life-and-death consequences. Police and prisons are the forces Black, Black Latinx, and Brown families organize their daily lives around avoiding. Treating the urgency behind defund and abolition demands as though it emerged from panic — rather than from an ongoing response to racial control that stretches back more than four hundred years — misreads where that urgency comes from.

In 1704, the Carolina colonies established some of the first organized slave patrols in what would become the foundations of American policing. Those patrols and bounty systems were created to hunt down enslaved people who had escaped, terrorize Black communities into submission, enforce slave codes, and separate families. Ask any Black person — African American, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Jamaican, Haitian, Cuban, from anywhere in the Caribbean or Latin America — and they will tell you: policing, ICE, and what academics call the carceral state have never been separate from the control of Black bodies. That remains true today. The shared history between African American and Puerto Rican communities begins with a shared legal and political condition: birthright to U.S. citizenship, paired in practice with second-class treatment. For African Americans, that condition was built through slavery, the collapse of Reconstruction, more than a century of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, disenfranchisement, state violence, and mass incarceration. For Puerto Ricans, it was built through colonialism.

For a moment, I considered not writing this. Not because I’m afraid of the pushback — the texts, emails, and DMs I might get — but because I hold two things at once: I’m a public historian, and my loyalty to another Boricua ends the moment I hear anti-Black comments, especially as a Black Puerto Rican woman. (Public history is the practice of making history accessible and useful outside traditional academic classrooms and journals, through collaboration with communities and institutions.)

One of the things I love about our people is that we know how to forgive. But the first step is accountability. I believe in second chances — my elders, comrades, and movement family have given me grace when I got it wrong, and I extend that same grace here. I think you deserve it too. But you must repair the harm your comments caused.

In October 2025, I launched an online seminar called The Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition. As a Black Puerto Rican Hip Hop feminist who has done this work for thirty years, I’ve watched conversations about Black-Latinx identity get louder without visibility translating into power. Talking about a problem is not the same as interrupting it. That gap is why I built this seminar: a five-week space where we work through Black Puerto Rican history, political organizing, and resistance movements across the diaspora, and connect that history to the anti-Blackness people are still living with today — in their families, workplaces, friend groups, and their own sense of self. We are now heading into our fifth cycle. More than one hundred people have come through the seminar so far, and every cycle makes clearer how needed this work is. I’ve watched people sit with grief and anger they had carried alone for years, and I’ve watched people have real breakthroughs. Participants have written to me afterward, sometimes months later, to say the seminar gave them the tools to talk to their families, peers, and communities — not just to feel the problem, but to name it and speak to it directly.

I don’t know if any of us can fully dismantle anti-Blackness. I’m not sure that’s a promise anyone can honestly make. But I do believe we can interrupt it. I’ve built this as an intentional community space, and people tend to stay connected to each other long after the five weeks end. I tell participants the same thing on the first day: “Don’t be ashamed of what you don’t know — know that you can still become the disrupter.” As Neely Fuller said, “If you don’t understand white supremacy/racism, everything that you do understand will only confuse you, and confusion leads to shame.” That shame is exactly what keeps people silent, and silence is what anti-Blackness depends on.

Originally published at Rosaclemente.substack.com. For information about her online seminar, Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition, email her at clementerosa@gmail.com.

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