Remember when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on the campaign trail that he wanted to increase taxes on richer, “whiter” residents? It seems he meant what he said.
That much should be obvious following New York Mamdani’s announcement on Monday that he’s going forward with a so-called Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan.
The plan released by the mayor’s office says that “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.”
It’s striking that a Muslim man born to Indian parents in Uganda, who only became a U.S. citizen in 2018 and yet is now mayor of the nation’s largest city, sees no irony in condemning New York’s history of “colonization.” But that’s just how it is on the Left. Only some colonizers are the bad ones.
According to the Gothamist, Mamdani’s racial equity plan aims to “improve pay equity in city roles, provide anti-racism training for city staff, and improve data collection across various demographics, among other goals.” While the plan seems to be lacking in specific details about exactly how this racial equity is to be reached (likely on purpose as we shall soon see), it appears to be set on the cornerstone of “antiracist” doctrines associated with disgraced intellectual Ibram X. Kendi.
The released document states that “it is important to acknowledge and understand that there are different forms of racism frequently interacting and functioning at the same time.”
This is a tip off that the city will find few if any forms of overt discrimination that most Americans with common sense would think of as racism. And that’s no good, as they see it.
Instead, the plan targets “policies and practices that create unequal outcomes, whether or not those institutions intend to do so (institutional), existing inequities that spread within a system of various institutions (systemic), as well as different systems that interact to perpetuate widespread racial inequality (structural).”
To put it simply, any racial disparity that exists for one of the groups the Left favors is defined as “racism” and therefore in need of rectifying through force of law.
NYC’s Chief Equity Officer Afua Atta-Mensah said while announcing the plan that the racial equity plan was born during the George Floyd era.
This should be old hat to anyone paying attention to American politics post-2020. Mamdani and friends are simply rehashing the ideology that brought us the “defund the police” movement and all sorts of other insanity during the height of the Great Awokening.
So, the equity plan represents continuity rather than a break for Democrats. The madness is back. You get what you voted for, New York.
While this represents a return to the DEI-centric nonsense that’s the never-ending obsession of the Left’s political and cultural elites, one can certainly find a positive angle to this story.
There’s been a serious pivot from not long ago that highlights just how much the country has changed in the last few years. It points to the serious impact the Trump administration has had on civil rights law.
Despite the clear philosophical framework that leads to using discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination, the New York City equity plan is stripped all references to DEI.
A report by the New York publication City & State found that “earlier drafts of the 375-page ‘New York City Preliminary Racial Equity Plan’ included explicit references to DEI and the city’s goals of hiring more people of color, which the city Law Department flagged as risky due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade against ‘woke’ DEI policies.”
In many cases, City & State reported, explicit DEI goals and quotas were removed from the public equity document. You can be sure that’s because they know the plan will be scrutinized by the Trump administration.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Office of Civil Rights, took to X and said the plan appeared to be “fishy/illegal” and plans to review it.
Given her other work, I’d say this is no idle threat. Much like how higher education has relentlessly and perniciously skirted laws banning affirmative action, left-wing governments aren’t going to give up now that the law is working against them. There are some in the Trump administration, like Dhillon, who not only understand that reality but also know how to fight it.
Democrats are quickly proving that their “affordability” pivot has been little more than rhetorical fluff. Or, more precisely, when the Left speaks about the issue of affordability it’s not in the way that most voters think about it. When they retake power, they’ll go right back to the well of racial and gender grievance under the guise of affordability.
But the cultural and legal Overton window has shifted.
This quotation in City & State by an anonymous city employee warmed my heart.
“This isn’t the ‘new era’ we signed up for,” the employee said about Mamdani’s plan. “Our neighbors are being taken off the streets, and the administration can’t even say DEI in a racial equity plan. This administration should be leading the way, not preemptively cowering in fear of Donald Trump or others pushing his hateful fascist agenda.”
Womp womp.
What was once accepted as inevitability has become a real battleground, even in places like New York City. The Left must now be more careful in the way it talks about and implements in many cases blatantly illegal DEI programs—thanks to President Donald Trump.
