This month’s professional spotlight features Andom Ghebreghiorgis. Andom is running for Congress in NY-16 (southern Westchester and North Bronx). Read this month’s spotlight to learn more about Andom and his campaign and run for Congress.

Could you briefly explain some of your responsibilities in your career role?

I am a former NYC special education teacher running for Congress in NY-16 (southern Westchester and North Bronx). I’m a first-time congressional candidate primarying an incumbent Democrat, so there’s a lot that needs to be done to effectively get my name out there and to amplify our message.

Unfortunately, a good amount of time is spent fundraising: combing through my network, calling progressive donors, and telling my aunts and uncles to forward our campaign donation link to every Habesha person they know on Viber. Our campaign is entirely people-powered (we don’t accept corporate PAC money), so all the support we’ve received, particularly from the Eritrean community, goes a long way in allowing us to develop our infrastructure and expand our field operations and communications.

I most enjoy chatting with folks in the district about our vision: to divest from the military and prison industrial complexes and invest our resources back in our community. People recognize the urgent need for change, and the positive responses to our message have been affirming and empowering. They help push me when I sometimes get bogged down by reading/writing policy or going through volunteer lists. Having the opportunity to canvass with my former students has also been amazing. They’re loud, funny, and extra, so they make for perfect people to interrupt strangers on the street.

What inspired your career path in politics?

Being an American of Eritrean descent forced me to become politicized at a young age. My family members were fighting for independence half-a-world away, and my parents were attuned to that, so I always had an awareness of things going on outside of the USA. The brutality of war was imprinted on me by news that traveled across deserts and oceans: deaths of faceless relatives whom I would never have the chance to meet.

That being said, I didn’t necessarily see politics as a career path (even though I majored in Political Science and Economics in undergrad). After graduating from college, I stumbled into education, and I taught for nine years. I always maintained a keen interest in what was happening around the world, and – prior to running – I was politically involved outside of education through writing and organizing.

What was your approach to following your career path?

My path into politics has been non-traditional. Most politicians don’t go from being a middle school special education teacher in the Bronx to being a congressional candidate. Most politicians don’t try and primary the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who has been in office for 30 years. So, while this wasn’t a deliberate career path of mine, I have always stayed true to my values and tried to serve for the greater good. This campaign is just another effort in that regard.

Is there a philosophy that drives your career?

Du Bois spoke about being black in America as having a “double-consciousness,” and I can say growing up as the black American child of Eritrean immigrants that I felt a triple-consciousness. There can be extreme trauma and difficulty in growing up and living in America as a first-generation black person: from Eritrean cultural dislocation to coming to terms with a white supremacist history of exploitation. The fact that many of our parents don’t have language or awareness to help us navigate the problems of race and racism here can exacerbate our struggle.

But there is also a blessing that comes from being racialized into marginalization: the opportunity and necessity for radical empathy. Even if they were not all directly my histories, I felt the pain of slavery, segregation, racism, genocide, and colonialism in me as a black person. I knew how hypocritical it would be for me to, even latently, support any system of oppression, when I understood the feeling of being oppressed myself.  I certainly don’t believe blackness or a group’s history of marginalization is a prerequisite for radical empathy, but, for me, this understanding helped me unpack my own privilege at a young age, helped me stand in solidarity with other oppressed groups, and helped serve as a foundation for my own activism and work in education. It bestowed upon me a liberatory politics that critiqued and questioned a status quo built on and sustained by imperialism, racism, sexism, and economic exploitation, and affirmed that the artifice of stability should never preclude people’s right to freedom, equality, and justice.

What fuels your passion for your community?

It’s my home, where I grew up and where I came back to teach. I love the energy, the people, and, particularly in Mount Vernon (my city), the community cohesion.

Mount Vernon is also just a really interesting city, one that in many ways, belies the stereotypical trappings of a dense, majority-black city. As of a couple years ago (this is no longer the case according to recent indicators), Mount Vernon, NY was one of only five places in the country where the median black income was higher than the median white income, which is a pretty crazy stat.

What’s the greatest thing about the district you hope to represent?

Our diversity and our commitment to others

What are some important issues in your community you’re hoping to address if you get elected?

For my generation of students born after 9/11, all they have known, every year of their life, is war; the threat of climate extinction; and the intractability of wage stagnation, college unaffordability, and income inequality.

The level of income inequality in my district is particularly acute. In Bronxville, just next door to my hometown of Mount Vernon, the median housing sale price is over $2 million. The median property tax on those homes is $50,000, which is roughly the same as the median household income here in Mount Vernon.

This adjacent inequality underscores the housing affordability crisis many communities in District 16 are facing. In Mount Vernon, homeless rates have skyrocketed. 10% of public school students in my city are homeless. In the Williams Bridge and Baychester sections of the Bronx, nearly 80% of low-income renters are moderately or severely rent-burdened. And this is just housing.

Rising housing costs, for example, are a social determinant for poorer health and education outcomes. These negatively reverberate into lower wages, which loop back and makes families more rent burdened. There are not one to two issues we are focusing on because we are dealing with interlocking systems of oppression and institutional barriers to social mobility. We are building a movement that is bringing transformative change to the system. We are going to ensure that our resources are invested in our communities and not diverted to forever wars or unnecessary jails that the current representative has funded. We will recognize affordable housing as a human right; guarantee jobs at fair wages; ensure Medicare for All; invest in clean energy, sustainable infrastructure and the Green New Deal; fully-fund public education from pre-K through college; and secure rights and justice for workers and historically marginalized groups.

What do you consider to be your greatest professional accomplishment?

One of best things about teaching middle school is knowing that your efforts can impact students at such a crucial, formative period in their life. You can help shape their identities while challenging misconceptions and widening their worldview. I have helped struggling readers gain four reading levels in two years and “like ELA for the first time.” I have had students confide in me that my poetry unit helped them find their voice and deal with suicide ideation. When teaching in Palestine, my students told me that my English immersion class made them optimistic that they could one day be fluent in English, a similar optimism they held on to that they would one day live free of occupation.

Many of the lessons the students absorb from your classes and your modelling are not even realized until much later in their life. I had a former, oft-suspended student from the Bronx, one whom I taught from 2009-11, randomly text me that I was the reason that he knew how to talk respectfully to women. I am immensely proud of all these moments, in which I helped my students become better people, even more so than any discrete, academic success on a test or on a unit. This leads me to my greatest achievement as a teacher, which is an anecdote a student shared with me that continues to ennoble my dedication to empathy and justice.

I taught at a high-needs public school in the Bronx from 2009-12. The school was plagued with violence and bullying, yet the administration did not implement social programs or positive behavioral supports to combat the problem. In my 12:1:1 class, the threat that my students with learning disabilities would be the targets of bullying, and the fear that my students with emotional disturbance would be the perpetrators of bullying, was distressing. As a result, I taught a unit on bullying and empathy aligned with reading Malcolm X: The Graphic Novel. The students loved it, and the unit culminated with a free trip we won to see the movie Bully, a harrowing documentary that illustrates the horrors of bullying in American schools.

Two days after seeing the movie, one of my more popular students told me that he had been an upstander. He said that ten older kids he was hanging out with on the corner had been picking on someone for “acting like a girl.” Despite the social pressure to fit in with the group, my student told me that he had thought of our conversations from analyzing Bully and knew that he had to be the support for the kid who didn’t have any (even if it could be dangerous for him to do so). My student stepped in and stopped the heteronormative bulling, telling his peer group that what they were saying “wasn’t right” and that they “needed to stop.” My student told me this story so passionately, his eyes beaming with pride, and I was impressed by his courage considering his age, the environment, and the circumstances. That moment confirmed to me that my teaching was making an impact, a significant one in my student’s life and a community plagued by so much violence.

Six years later, my upstanding student who defended the lonesome kid against a mob ended up in prison for allegedly committing a violent act. When I hear news reporters on TV dehumanize criminals, I think back to my student, his humanity, his heart as full of potential as his empathy. I know that my student, despite being in prison, is still, fundamentally, that same young upstander. His community is rife with negative influences, and somewhere along the way he got strayed off his path. Evermore, this has demanded me to work in urban schools that serve high-needs populations. However, it also serves as a reminder of my student’s courageous strength, how my teaching helped him harness it, and how I know he will once again harness it for good in the future.

What tips or advice would you offer anyone looking to follow a similar career path?

• Center and listen to the voices of those closest to the struggle.
• Organize your community around actions and issues of importance.
• Network horizontally and share/develop skills with people you already engage with (we are not and we do not need saviors).
• Critically evaluate your own world and constantly expose yourself to others (read a lot of history and political theory!)

How can people learn more about your campaign and run for Congress?

Check us out at andomforny.com! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with what we’re doing daily. And if you are interested in our message or have friends/family who would be, please donate here or to sign up to volunteer.

Outside of all of your hard work and efforts toward building your brand, what do you do for fun? Hobbies?

I play a lot of basketball and flag football! I’m a pretty spry 34-years old (yekenyele Eritrean chicken legs), but I know this won’t last forever, so I have to get in as much sports as possible before I can no longer play.

I also love watching sports (yes, all sports, even hockey). I’m a Knicks, Giants, Yankees, and Rangers fan. I watch a lot of soccer too, on TV and live. I went to South Africa for 2010 World Cup, France for 2016 Euros, and was in Russia last year for the 2018 World Cup.

As you can expect, I enjoy travelling, which I do a lot. I also do a lot of reading and hilarious cross-cultural arguing with the elders in the family, both of which I sometimes enjoy.