The Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down affirmative action is effectively “undoing all of our rights,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday on a panel featuring six Black mayors at the Global Black Economic Forum in New Orleans.
It’s imperative that the nation addresses the inequities within the US educational system because it’s the primary foundation for circumventing unemployment, homelessness and violence later down the road, Adams said on a panel joined by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Cleveland’s Justin Bibb, New Orleans’ LaToya Cantrell and Los Angeles’ Karen Bass.
Education serves as a vessel for awareness and a pipeline for filling jobs, according to Adams. “We have allowed our children to fall off an educational cliff,” he said.
Through a partnership with New York City’s Department of Education Chancellor David Banks, Adams said he hopes to transform the community’s legacy of education to “K through career,” as opposed to solely focusing on kindergarten through the senior year of high school.
“Education is the cornerstone of our inequities and our failure in this country,” he said. “If we don’t educate our children, they’re no longer going to fail in their neighborhood. They’re gonna fail on the globe.”
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Meanwhile, half of New York City’s current prison population of 5,000 battles with mental health issues, while 18% wrestle with severe mental health crises, Adams said.
A focus should be on building appropriate mental health facilities to offer New York City residents the support they need proactively, so they won’t be on a “revolving door” of waiting until they commit a crime to receive proper care, he said.
