Can Jamaal Bowman be the next AOC?

On March 1, which feels about 20 years ago, NBC News published an essay by a congressional candidate, Jamaal Bowman, about the scars he bore from life in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was running for president.

“As a working-class black male educator during the entirety of Bloomberg’s tenure, I got to experience the horrors and the trauma of how his police department treated people like me,” wrote Bowman. He described an inexplicable arrest following a routine traffic stop, and another after he was accused of stealing his own car. He wrote about Eric Garner and Sean Bell, two black men killed by NYPD cops, and about the growing police presence in the city schools where Bowman had made his career.

At the time, I was only halfaware of Bowman’s primary campaign against the high-ranking Democrat Eliot Engel, and didn’t think he had much of a chance. In 2018, the Democratic insurgents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley won surprising victories over longtime Democratic incumbents. But since then, the only progressive primary challenger who’s ousted a sitting member of Congress has been Marie Newman in Illinois.

Engel’s district, New York’s 16th, encompasses parts of Westchester, some quite wealthy, and of the Bronx. As Bowman told me, if it were a country it would be one of the most unequal in the world. Though it’s majority-minority, affluent white people tend to vote in primaries at higher rates than poorer people of color, and the suburbanites in the New York 16th are probably not as left-leaning as the young gentrifiers who helped elect Ocasio-Cortez. Engel seemed safe.

But the political world of three months ago no longer exists. “The coronavirus and where we are now, it’s like the Great Depression and the civil rights movement at the same time,” Bowman told me. The campaign he’s running, centered on racial and economic justice, seems to match the moment. Engel’s, to put it mildly, does not. At a news conference in the Bronx, he was caught on a hot mic asking for a speaking slot, saying, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care.”

The election on June 23 will thus be a test of whether the energy on American streets translates into votes. Engel is a 16-term incumbent, the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. If he’s dethroned by a political newcomer calling for defunding the police, it could be as politically earthshaking as Ocasio-Cortez’s victory two years ago.

Recently, Bowman’s been getting important endorsements. Ocasio-Cortez threw her support behind him last week, as did the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer.

When Bowman talks about redirecting funds from the police to social services, he draws on his experiences in education. Before he helped found Cornerstone Academy of Social Action, a wellregarded Bronx middle school, in 2009, he was the dean of students at a high school where part of his job was to monitor the metal detectors as his black and Latino students arrived. “I felt like a corrections officer. I didn’t feel like an educator,” he said.

The school was open seven days a week, providing services to parents as well as children. But the community suffered in ways that no school could fix. He had students whose fathers were killed. A local teenager, Ramarley Graham, was shot to death by the police. Others died by suicide.

“When you look at the impact of concentrated poverty that’s been created by bad policy, and the trauma that results from that, and then add on top of it stopand-frisk policing, zero-tolerance schools, you’re dealing with a population of black and Latino students that consistently feel occupied,” he said.

It’s that feeling of occupation that so many are rebelling against right now.

Around the country and the world, this rage and mourning is toppling statues. We’ll soon find out whether it can also topple politicians.

Michelle Goldberg became a columnist for The New York Times in 2017.