ABOUT ANDOM

I am running for Congress because the progressive people of District-16 are struggling with housing, healthcare, retirement security, and a lack of jobs, but our representative has been more concerned with diverting our public money to endless wars and unnecessary prisons.
 
I’m Andom Ghebreghiorgis, and I grew up in Mount Vernon, NY to parents who emigrated from Eritrea. I have a younger brother and sister and an enormous extended family scattered throughout the world.
 
I attended Lincoln School in Mount Vernon and then Fieldston, in Riverdale, for middle and high school. I graduated from Yale with degrees in Political Science and Economics in 2007. After working at the Robin Hood Foundation, I became a NYC Teaching Fellow in 2009 (I received my Master’s in Secondary Special Education at CCNY). I taught MS special education at a renewal school in the Bronx (MS 113) and then was a SPED coordinator/ELA teacher at The Equity Project in Washington Heights. I have written a children’s book (Undercover BMX), led workshops on infusing AAVE into English curricula, taught free SAT courses to low-income students, and organized against out-of-school suspensions.
 
My own personal history informed my unyielding commitment to fighting for the rights of and justice for all people. WEB 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 cultural dislocation to coming to terms with a white supremacist history of exploitation. The fact that many immigrant 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, heteropatriarchy, and economic exploitation, and affirmed that the artifice of stability should never preclude people’s right to freedom, equality, and justice.
 
That is why, I am ready to fight for change:

-Against the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Special Education, LGBTQ+ Inclusive Education, School Integration

- Global Green New Deal, Foreign Policy of Peace and Decolonization, Immigrant and Refugee Rights, UNSC Reform

- Federal Job Guarantee, Homes Guarantee, Medicare for All

- Reparations for Black and indigenous Americans

- Workplace Democracy

- This election is a referendum on whether we can support an agenda of neoliberalism and austerity. I’m proud to be in this race for the people.