At a National Action Network rally led by the Rev. Al Sharpton on Saturday, both congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the five-term incumbent she is trying to unseat, emphasized the need for Black and Dominican American communities to unite against a common enemy. But the two candidates had very different ideas of who that enemy was.
For Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist, the enemy was those who weaponize identity to divide marginalized groups and prevent them from realizing their common material interests. For Espaillat, the enemy was the “gentrifiers” who make up Avila Chevalier’s base.
Avila Chevalier invoked her own Afro-Dominican identity to make the case that Latino communities in neighborhoods like Washington Heights and Black communities in neighborhoods in Harlem were not rivals…