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At Stonewall 50, Ensuring Students Know the Real Story of Our City and See Themselves in Its History


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Council Member Daniel Dromm, the author (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


New York City is among the most diverse places in the country. It is home to more than 3 million foreign-born residents, 200 languages, 80 religious affiliations, and countless individuals who are part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community. Our city should celebrate the diversity that defines New York, including teaching young people about our extraordinarily rich history and culture.

Fortunately, there is already a model that can show us the way forward. Culturally responsive education (CRE) aligns educational curricula with students’ backgrounds and life experiences. The education with which we equip the next generation should enable our students to connect their classroom studies to their lived experiences. Moreover, it should instill confidence in our students of their own identities so that they may see how others like themselves have contributed to America’s history.

This Sunday, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. Out of this movement emerged two prophetic voices: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Both of these transwomen of color were at the Stonewall Inn during the clashes with police and participated in numerous protest rallies and marches in the aftermath.

They were known for founding STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and supporting LGBTQ+ homeless individuals. The city will soon immortalize Johnson’s and Rivera’s places in history with a monument in Greenwich Village. However, too few New Yorkers, including students in our schools, know about these civil rights heroes and their work protecting and empowering the most marginalized and vulnerable members of our society.

CRE asks us to view the accolades of historical figures such as Harlem Renaissance performer Gladys Bentley and 1963 March on Washington architect Bayard Rustin in the context of their lives. They were queer people of color who overcame tremendous obstacles, long before Pride marches and Black Lives Matter. They are fascinating figures worthy of study precisely because of the multiple identities and the various environments they had to navigate.

Recognizing the complexity of such persons and promoting their stories allow the youth of New York City to find themselves in history. Amending school curricula and changing reading lists to reflect the contributions of a wide variety of Americans creates an environment that celebrates the richness of New York’s many communities. It also fosters a more welcoming classroom and an education that is personally relevant to our students.

In this way, CRE is truly student-centered learning. It keeps our students – particularly those who feel least included – engaged in and attuned to the accomplishments of those sidelined by the traditional narrative of American history and culture.

City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has agreed to accept the School Diversity Advisory Group recommendation to have CRE imbedded into all schools for all grades, welcome news indeed. I encourage the New York City Department of Education to implement it as soon as possible and ensure that sexual orientation and gender identity are fully integrated.

We deprive our students when we do not tell them the truth about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. All of our schools need to embrace CRE and prepare the next generation for a future where well-informed, critically-thinking citizens and residents will be even more desperately needed.

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Daniel Dromm is a former New York City public school teacher and represents the communities of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in the City Council. On Twitter @Dromm25.

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The Williams Pipeline Came Back from the Dead - But the Shellfish Won’t


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(photo: the governor's office)


Maybe you’ve heard: the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement Pipeline, proposed to carry fracked gas through New York Harbor yet temporarily stopped by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation due to water-quality concerns, is already back from the dead. Because the needed permit was denied by the DEC “without prejudice,” Williams was allowed to reapply, and—putting quickness above caution—it already has.

About 99% of the new application is what you might expect: if we slow this and reduce that, Williams claims, all will turn out well for the clams and other species that live on the seafloor of New York Bay. Never mind that, if we were to do x as originally proposed, we’d fill the water with toxic mercury and copper; at x-1, all is fine.

These quibbles are maddening largely because the very idea of the project under discussion—a fracked gas pipeline that would lock us into fossil fuel usage for another 50 years—is, in the context of the climate crisis, already so patently absurd. Yet nothing in the new application is quite so absurd as one mitigation measure buried deep in the application’s third appendix.

Because Williams assumes “100% mortality” to all hard clams and other bottom-dwelling species along the 23-mile path of the pipeline, it has proposed what are essentially shellfish offsets: to make up for the deaths, they’ve offered to donate $3.4 million to the Long Island Shellfish Restoration Project, which would “support Governor Cuomo’s efforts to improve water quality...in Long Island, and effectively mitigate Project impacts on benthic habitat in New York waters.”

In case the DEC need be reminded, Williams has applied for a Water Quality Certificate intended to protect New York Bay and Raritan Bay, where the pipeline would be built. The waters that the Long Island Shellfish Restoration Project serve, however—Bellport Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and others—are 150 miles away out on Long Island, and with few outlets to the sea. Because of this, the water filtration and other benefits that additional shellfish would bring to those areas wouldn’t help New York Bay or Raritan Bay in the least. Offsets of this type would merely rob Peter to pay Paul.

The logic of Williams’ proposal is that of many market-based mitigation strategies: take something representing a scarcity (clams or carbon), turn it into a monetized abstraction divorced from place and circumstance and history, and use false equivalencies across vast geographical distances to justify continuing on with business as usual. Raise a claim here, kill a clam there—it all evens out in the end.

What gets lost in this scheme and all others like it is the fact that specific place and history matter: it is New York Bay that was once a dumping ground for 275 million gallons of industrial waste per day, New York Bay that has seen a miraculous recovery in water quality over the past 50 years, New York Bay where dolphin and whale sightings have recently skyrocketed, and New York Bay that needs to be protected vigilantly lest we see all of this progress completely vanish. Offsets would do nothing towards this end.

They also wouldn’t amount to any kind of sacrifice for Williams, which brought in $4.6 billion last year and stands to gain a 14% return on equity from this project. What would be sacrificed is the health of New York Bay, making Williams’ plan yet another example of a corporation using dollar signs to distract from the damage it would inflict on the public commons while privatizing all gains.  

The company’s rationale is clear enough: Williams is hoping that money might help make approving the pipeline a bit more palatable for the DEC, which is aware of the carnage at stake. In the new application, in order to come up with the mitigation figure of $3.4 million, Williams placed a value of $0.25 on each clam that would be affected by pipeline construction. Divide $.25 into $3.4 million and you get 13.6 million dead clams. That’s a lot for any environmental regulator’s conscience.

Governor Cuomo and the DEC must not fall for these corporate tricks. To do so would be to abdicate the responsibilities of the DEC under the Clean Water Act, which requires agencies to protect local aquatic species, not abstract, equate, and offset them. It would also be to endorse the idea that our ecosystems and aquatic commons are for sale as long as the offer is right.

Yet we cannot allow our ecological future to be bought. Governor Cuomo and the DEC must protect our harbor, not use it as a bargaining chip. The only way to do that is to stop the Williams Pipeline for good.

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Robert Wood is an organizer with the climate action group 350Brooklyn, which is part of the Stop the Williams Pipeline Coalition.

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A Big Mistake Atop the New York GOP


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Nick Langworthy, left, with Donald Trump (photo: @NickLangworthy)


Anointing Erie County Republican leader Nicholas J. Langworthy as State Party Chair is an embarrassment for the New York GOP.

Under his leadership, Erie Republicans have been shut out of nearly every elected office countywide. They’ve lost the county legislature, lost Assemblymember Ray Walter, and lest we forget Congressional Rep. Chris Collins is still walking that long Green Mile towards resignation and life as a future convicted felon.

Recall, it was Langworthy’s last-minute bush-league back-door skulduggery (infamous Nixon lawyer Don Segretti would’ve used a different term) that saddled New York’s GOP with crazed alt-right racist Carl Paladino atop the 2010 statewide ticket, dooming down-ballot candidates in close races like former State Comptroller candidate Harry Wilson and former Attorney General candidate Dan Donovan.

Now, Langworthy’s slated to take over the State Party in July, and all he knows how to do is lose.

In his announcement speech on April 28, Langworthy pledged to “rebuild, retool, and revitalize” the Republican brand south of Poughkeepsie, but I doubt he has any real interest in or even comprehends the scope of the problem currently facing the Empire State GOP.

In the last election, Republican candidates running atop the party ticket scored 15% in New York City, 30% in Westchester, and 41% in Nassau – seven downstate counties that account for 51% of the statewide vote. Which means, Mr. Langworthy, if you’re going to “rebuild” then you’ve got to “retool” to win urban Democrats, a lot of urban Democrats, in an emotionally raw, hyper-partisan political environment.

Suburban women are abandoning the party in droves. Exit data from 2018 spells out pretty clearly you’re not going to win them back by preaching the gospel according to Donald. Meanwhile, according to Siena’s latest statewide study, more than 60% of New Yorkers across every demographic and in all three regions said under no circumstances would they vote to re-elect the president.

Which means you can kiss any halfhearted “revitalize” effort goodbye.

Outgoing State Party Chair Ed Cox came in after the Obama wave of 2008 decimated state and local parties. But after four years he took us from two members of Congress to nine, won both Westchester and Nassau County Executive races, won a State Senate majority, and bolstered party fundraising to the point where this past cycle, the State GOP reported raising a record total of $12 million.

And he didn’t have to kiss white supremacist backsides in order to do it either.

By transferring the party’s political power structure away from the financial focal point, and installing an ersatz executor with little knowledge or experience of what it takes to campaign in the five boroughs, the GOP is firing a shot into both its feet, setting itself alight, and crying out, “This is fine.”

Expect high-dollar donors to close their wallets, expect top-tier candidates below the Tappan Zee to take a pass on running, expect very little buy-in from many urban and suburban communities that the Republican Party under Donald Trump has its best interests at heart.

In a recent City Journal article, longtime political observer Bob McManus wrote that the New York State GOP has “nothing left to lose.” Au contraire, Bob. There’s still lots left to lose – local electeds downstate, county officers in the Hudson Valley, and what few remaining legislative incumbents we still have. However, Nick Langworthy is the wrong man at the wrong time to try to preserve it, never mind rehabilitating the party in time to recapture the State Senate ahead of redistricting, or breaking the long-standing statewide drought in 2022.

Republicans don’t need a State Party chair who triples down on a losing horse, is devoid of integrity, who lacks wisdom, and whose vision for the future aligns with alt-right extremists like Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Gavin McInnes.

No wonder traditional pro-business groups like the New York State Business Council and local Chambers of Commerce have been distancing themselves from the GOP in recent weeks and months. Trickle down Trumpism.

At the end of the day, we get the world we deserve, but if this is the future the party wants, then…dracarys.

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John William Schiffbauer is a political consultant and was Deputy Communications Director for the New York Republican State Committee from 2014-16. On Twitter @JWSGOP.

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