Black Puerto Ricans and other Afro/Black Latinx people must use this as a teachable moment.

“AOC and Mamdani Wanted to Defund the Police. Their Backtracking Puts Organizers at Risk.”

“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 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.”-DERECKA PURNELL

Pressed further, she 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, Zohran 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.

The 5th cycle of the Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition begins September 13, 2026, and runs through October 11, 2026 — five consecutive Sundays, two hours each. Fee: $175. Payment arrangements are available. To register, email me at clementerosa@gmail.com

clementerosa@gmail.com

But I refuse to let this be explained away as only a drought, because luxury hotels and resorts — with their cisterns and backup generators — can depend on water and electricity in ways that Boricuas on the island cannot. Since 1898 — for 128 years — the United States has shaped the legal, economic, and educational conditions under which Puerto Rico is governed by United States imperialism. That history is not a backdrop; it is the lived reality of our people in Puerto Rico itself. Families are experiencing days without water, and too often without electricity. The path forward cannot be limited to short-term fixes. A colonial boot on our necks will not end until we break the foot of those wearing the boot. We must tear down the structure that allows these violations to continue, and that means ending this abusive relationship once and for all.

The crisis in Puerto Rico is a colonial crisis that started on July 25, 1898. These are violations of our human rights, nothing less. Water is a human right. Housing is a human right. Electricity is a human right. Education is a human right. When people are forced to live without these things under a colonial whip, that is not misfortune. It is violation. The United States has been extracting land, sugar, minerals, food, and people since 1898. They have colonized us, sterilized our women, assassinated our leaders, banned flying our flag in public, incarcerated our freedom fighters, and made us American citizens against our collective will. This is a form of racial capitalism.

Since Hurricane María in 2017, the calls and the fighting for a free and independent Puerto Rico have grown louder and stronger. Mutual aid has been the answer to María. As we decolonize our land, we must continue to decolonize our minds and believe that we can win independence. The actual path to Puerto Rican independence requires an act of self-determination authorized by the U.S. Congress. This process involves a binding plebiscite or status convention, a negotiated transition of sovereignty, and the formal termination of the Territorial Clause under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Voters on the island would choose their future status in a federally recognized and supervised referendum, removing the current colonial commonwealth arrangement from the ballot. Upon a majority vote for independence, a local convention would draft a national constitution and establish sovereign governing institutions(United Nations) These are the first steps in the march toward freedom and recognition from the international community. Once we achieve this, we can then begin the process of taking the United States head-on in the United Nations and demanding reparations for 128 years of abuses.

As our people are filling buckets, the colonial government has approved Esencia: a two-billion-dollar luxury development in Cabo Rojo — two thousand acres, five hundred luxury hotel rooms, golf courses, and a private airport — approved without public hearings, over the objections of the Defiende a Cabo Rojo Coalition and Boricuas across the diaspora who have marched from San Juan to the doors of JPMorgan Chase in Manhattan. Golf courses will use water while communities are rationed. This is land theft. Governor Jenniffer González, who co-chaired Latinos for Trump, found a path to fast-track Esencia. Sources are reporting that Bad Bunny will close out his world tour with final concerts in Puerto Rico at Estadio Hiram Bithorn at the end of this month, around August 21–23.

BENITO: In good conscience, you must cancel your shows and join your people on the front lines. You sang “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii” as a warning — that they want to take our land, our shorelines, our essence. That warning still matters. But when the people are living with rationing and outages, staging stadium concerts as if nothing is happening is a disgrace. Redirect those resources to the organizations doing the work — fund the water brigades, support Defiende a Cabo Rojo, meet with communities in the neighborhoods and not only with officials, and march with the people, the organizers, the workers, the artists. And I must say this is not the first contradiction. Your partnership with Amazon — whose streaming carried your residency, and whose cloud division holds contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, the same agencies you rightly refused to perform near — is a contradiction. Your 150-piece capsule collection with Zara — a fast-fashion giant that has faced sustained boycott calls over its ties to Israel amid the genocide in Gaza — is a contradiction. And this May you walked the Met Gala carpet at an event whose honorary chairs were the billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, while our people were already living through months of water outages. The question can no longer be avoided: you cannot have it both ways. Are you with the people, or are you with the billionaire class? Are you okay performing in a stadium that has electricity and water while neighborhoods five hundred yards away — and others across la isla — are subjected to the continual violation of our people’s human rights? This is the time to make a choice. Either one will be on the historical record. It is up to you what side you want to be on.

Familia, let me be clear: no artist is, or ever was, the voice of our resistance. Boricuas organizing, resisting, and insisting on rights and accountability — the coalitions, the brigades — are the voices. No celebrity ever freed anyone. Only we, the people, united, will do that. Celebrity attention and visibility come and go; we the people, united, never leave. Wherever you are as a Boricua, organize where you live. Join the coalitions already working. Build from block to barrio. This historic moment calls for warriors, and each one of us has the capacity to be one.Seize the time! Free Puerto Rico. Free the Land. Pa’lante, siempre, pa’lante.

Turn on any major Latino media outlet, scan any telenovela casting, walk into any meeting held under the banner of “Latino unity,” and usually, proximity to whiteness dominates, as well the politics of Black liberation is silenced. Black Latinx people are missing, reduced to a symbol, or pressured into believing that bringing up race is disloyalty to a community that was structured to keep them at the margins. Adding “Afro” or “Black” in front of latinidad does not fix the foundation; it reinforces it. That move asks Black people to swallow the whiteness built into latinidad and call it belonging. A prefix cannot erase centuries of anti-Blackness; it just makes the arrangement feel more acceptable.

Scholars like José Esteban Muñoz describe latinidad as “messy” and “unstable,” and this is why the five-week seminar I teach is called the Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition. Latinidad is not our baseline for any discussions on race; we deconstruct it and move on from the concept that was made to lump people together more than it was meant to free them, and how that lack of ideological substance is not a mistake, it is the point. A word with no political spine cannot carry a political project. What it can do, and what Latinidad has done, is pull Black and Indigenous people into a category that dulls their specific histories of struggle, swapping political sharpness for demographic readability. In organizing and social justice spaces, language is not decoration. When we speak with terms that blur us out, we drain the politics from our own Blackness. We show up to the table having already handed over the framework we need to name what has been done to us and to demand an accounting. This continuing erasure is why I created the Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition. In this five-week seminar, we explore the historical, cultural, and political forces shaping Black-Puerto Rican resistance movements across the diaspora. Rooted in Pan-Africanism, Puerto Rican nationalism, hip-hop culture, and cultural production, this journey provides essential tools. In this space is where we deconstruct latinidad and center pro-Blackness.

In 2019, the Nation published an article: The Problem with Latinidad by Miguel Salazar. This is what I said: “Latinidad’ is an academic term that failed because it erases away race. For those of us who are Black Puerto Ricans or maybe identify as Indigenous, what it really does is it just waters down who we are, and it erases Blackness. Clemente argues that Afro-Latino identity has often fed into rather than disrupted the myth of a multicultural democracy in Latin America—the idea that people are a “perfect blend” of African, Spanish, and Indigenous heritage. This framing becomes a way to deny institutional and individual Her personal stance. Clemente identifies as a “Black Puerto Rican” rather than Afro-Latina, explaining that “Afro is not a race and neither is Latino, Latina or Latinx. Those are not races, they’re not ethnicities.” She sees terms like Afro-Latino as focusing too much on culture—”food, dance and skin color”—without a real political commitment to Black liberation.“

Some scholars still argue Latinidad can be reclaimed and turned into a decolonial project. I refuse that, fully. You cannot reclaim what was never built with you in mind. Audre Lorde said it plainly: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I know exactly who I am, a Black Puerto Rican woman whose ancestors arrived at the Western hemisphere in chains. That is not a subcategory inside someone else’s framework. Our Blackness is complete, and it does not need to negotiate for space inside a concept constructed to make us disappear. So come on the journey to decolonize your mind and learn how to uproot anti-Blackness in yourself, your family, your job, your community.

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Last night, Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor-Elect of New York City. But this wasn’t just an election—it was a triumph. In 56 days, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist, Muslim, South Asian immigrant will become Mayor Zohran Mamdani, leader of one of the most powerful cities in the world. He won with an unapologetic, multiracial, working-class coalition: immigrants, tenants, students, artists, liberals, digital activists—young, middle-aged, and elders alike. It was a moment of joy, vindication, survival, and resistance.

And then Van Jones spoke.

• “I think he missed a chance tonight to open up and bring more people into the tent. I think his tone was sharp. I think he was using the microphone in a way that he was almost yelling. And that’s not the Mamdani that we’ve seen on TikTok and the great interviews and stuff like that, so I felt like there was a little bit of a character switch here where the warm, open, embracing guy that’s close to working people was not on stage tonight, and there was some other voice on stage.”

• “I think that Mamdani is the one you need to hear from tonight. There are a lot of people trying to figure out, can I get on this train with him or not. Is he going to include me? Is he going to be more of a class warrior even in office?”

• “He defeated Democratic Party royalty. The Cuomos, that’s a royal family in our party, defeated them. Defeated the oligarchs and rich folks who jumped in to try to stop them, and then defeated Donald Trump. So the triumphalism that you see there is earned.”

• “He’s very young, and he just pulled off something that’s very, very difficult, and I wouldn’t write him off, but I think he missed an opportunity to open himself up tonight. And I think that that will probably cost him going forward.”

Instead of offering congratulations, Jones chose to scold Mamdani. His critique—masked as advice—echoed a familiar refrain: “Be quiet. Be respectful. Be safe.” To Gen Z and to those of us who’ve been fighting for decades, it sounded like déjà vu.

I feel that deeply. In 2008, at the age of 34, I ran for vice president on the Green Party ticket alongside Cynthia McKinney. We were the only women of color on a national ticket. I didn’t run to be liked—I ran to make change. My platform called for an end to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, freedom for political prisoners, cancellation of student debt, abolition of fossil fuels and the carceral state, and the creation of a Department of Peace. I ran because our communities—Black, Brown, working-class, immigrant—were being silenced. I ran to challenge a two-party system that had failed us. I ran on dignity, justice, and radical love.

I was mocked and called crazy. Two mentors told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life—and then stopped speaking to me. That was 17 years ago.

So when Van Jones says Mamdani’s joy was “too much,” it feels dismissive. Infantilizing. When conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was killed, Van called for calm and civility. But when Mamdani—a young, brown, Muslim socialist—wins against all odds after being attacked and demonized, Jones chooses to pal around with white men like Scott Jennings, Bill Maher, and Newt Gingrich.

If you read Mamdani’s emotion as “too much,” you’ve missed the point. And the hypocrisy. Van Jones has a long history of working with conservatives—men who openly oppose Black and Brown liberation. You want us to be polite while we’re under assault in every way?

In 56 days, Mamdani will take the oath of office. That’s a win. But governing is the real test. Who will he appoint? Will he work with grassroots organizations like the Justice Committee, Communities for Police Reform, RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison), and the Alliance of Families for Justice? What will he do when the NYPD brutalizes our people? Will he shut down Rikers Island? Will he side with the people—or with NYSCOPBA and the police?

That’s the test. That’s where movements either grow or get co-opted.

Van’s critique was infantilizing. It was a warning: be careful, be quiet, be polite. But Mamdani’s voice comes from a combination of pain, joy, and urgency. My advice to Van: stop. Young people aren’t asking for permission. They’re demanding transformation. They’re not waiting for legacy institutions to catch up—they’re building new ones.

If you can’t accept that energy, at least don’t stand in its way.

Stop policing young voices. Stand with them. Support them—not with performative praise, but with genuine power-sharing, authentic relationships, and real solidarity, because Mamdani doesn’t just represent a shift in leadership. He represents a culture shift. A culture that refuses to apologize for its joy, its defiance, and its dreams. A culture that knows survival is political, and celebration is a form of resistance.

So Van, if you can’t embrace that energy, you’ve already picked a side—and it’s not with the people.

The kicker for me was when my friend stated that the island of Puerto Rico was not a part of the African Diaspora. I wanted to go back to the old skool playground days and yell: “You said what about my momma?!” But after speaking to several friends, I found out that many Black Americans and Latinos agree with him. The miseducation of the Negro is still in effect!

I am so tired of having to prove to others that I am Black, that my peoples are from the Motherland, that Puerto Rico, along with Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, are part of the African Diaspora. Do we forget that the slave ships dropped off our people all over the world, hence the word Diaspora?

The Atlantic slave trade brought Africans to Puerto Rico in the early 1500s. Some of the first slave rebellions took place on the island of Puerto Rico. Until 1846, Africanos on the island had to carry a libreta to move around the island, like the passbook system in apartheid South Africa. In Puerto Rico, you will find large communities of descendants of the Yoruba, Bambara, Wolof and Mandingo people. Puerto Rican culture is inherently African culture.

Hundreds of books will inform you, but I do not need to read book after book to legitimize this thesis. All I need to do is go to Puerto Rico and look all around me. Damn, all I really have to do is look in the mirror every day.

I am often asked what I am—usually by Blacks who are lighter than me and by Latinos/as who are darker than me. To answer the $64,000 question, I am a Black Boricua, Black Rican, Puertorique’a! Almost always, I am questioned about why I choose to call myself Black over Latina, Spanish, or Hispanic. Let me break it down.

I am not Spanish. Spanish is just another language I speak. I am not a Hispanic. My ancestors are not from Spain, but rather from Africa. I define my existence by race and land. (Borinken is the indigenous name of the island of Puerto Rico.)

Being Latino is not a cultural identity but rather a political one. Being Puerto Rican is not a racial identity, but rather a cultural and national one. Being Black is my racial identity. Why do I have to explain this to those who are supposedly conscious all the time? Is it because they have a problem with their identity? Why is it so bad to assert who I am, for me to big-up my Africanness?

My Blackness is one of the most extraordinary aspects of my identity. We live in a society that devalues Blackness all the time. I will not be devalued as a human being, as a child of the Supreme Creator.

Although many of us in activist circles are enlightened, we all carry baggage that we must address. So many times, I am asked why many Boricuas refuse to affirm their Blackness. I attribute this denial to the ever-rampant anti-Black sentiment in America and throughout the world, but I will not use this as an excuse. Often, Puerto Ricans who assert our Blackness are not only ostracized by Latinos who identify more with their Spanish Conqueror than their African ancestors, but we are also shunned by Black Americans who do not see us as Black.

Nelly Fuller, a great Black sociologist, stated:

“Until one understands the system of White supremacy, anything and everything else will confuse you.” quote=”Until one understands the system of White supremacy, anything and everything else will confuse you.”

Divide and conquer still applies.

Listen, people: Being Black is not just skin color, nor is it synonymous with Black Americans. To assert who I am is the most liberating and revolutionary thing I can ever do. Being a Black Puerto Rican encompasses me racially, ethically, and most importantly, gives me a homeland to refer to.

So I have come to this conclusion: I am whatever I say I am! (Thank you, Rakim.)