America’s favorite socialist import, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, just dropped his Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan and unsurprisingly surmised that white New Yorkers are too wealthy.
According to his new report, a 375 page bureaucratic word salad spread across 45 city agencies, the median net worth of a white household in NYC is roughly $277,000. For black households it’s about $19,000, a nearly 15-fold difference. Mamdani’s solution to this abhorrent problem, is a “whole-of-government” race-based overhaul that explicitly prioritizes “black and brown New Yorkers” who’ve supposedly been “pushed out” for decades.
This is an odd way of saying black and brown people are going to be given special treatment over their white counterparts.
The plan is textbook grievance politics dressed up as compassion. It lays out hundreds of goals, more than 800 strategies, and over 600 indicators across all 45 city agencies, to try and put down the white folk. From housing and health to pothole filling, these agencies must view their work through a “racial equity lens.” In other words, resources, jobs, and contracts will be doled out based on skin color, not merit, need, or behavior. This will coincide with anti-racism training for city workers, pay equity mandates by race, and new “True Cost of Living” measures — all absolutely necessary to ensure a nation’s success, right?
It won’t be cheap. The Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice and the Commission on Racial Equity (a mouthful) is already budgeted at $10.2 million per year, which is a 42% jump from last year. Meanwhile, New York City is staring at a $5.4 – $7.1 billion budget shortfall. But sure, let’s keep pouring money into this black hole of DEI bureaucracy.
Harmeet Dillion, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, immediately said she would look into the proposal, and reminded Americans that there’s no such thing as “reverse discrimination” — it’s just plain old discrimination, and it’s illegal.
The real driver of these gaps isn’t some ancient conspiracy keeping black and brown New Yorkers down. It’s the policy machine the city built over decades. Benefit structures that penalized marriage and work over dependency didn’t close wealth gaps — they entrenched them, weakening family formation in the communities they claimed to help. Meanwhile, high taxes, crime, failing schools, and endless red tape pushed productive families out. Mamdani’s plan doesn’t reckon with any of that. It just adds a racial lens to the same failed apparatus.
This is the horseshoe theory in action. Marxist “equity” meets identity politics and ends up in the same place, punishing success to buy votes. The Supreme Court already gutted race-based preferences, correctly identifying that explicit discrimination by race violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Mamdani knows this, he just hopes Trump’s DOJ is too busy to sue.
New Yorkers deserve color-blind policy, not skin-color equity delivered by a Champagne socialist. Prioritizing one race over another doesn’t close “inequity” gaps, it widens resentment and accelerates the exodus of taxpayers who actually fund the whole circus. When the bill finally comes due — because it always does — by way of higher taxes, worse services, and more crime, the same “disproportionately affected” communities will be the hardest hit.
Mamdani ran on affordability. Now he’s pivoting to race essentialism because actual solutions such as school choice, cutting regulations, enforcing the law, and promoting two parent families are politically inconvenient for a Democratic Socialists of America mayor. It’s easier to blame “whiteness” than failed ideology.
They call this “racial equity.” I don’t think so. Because once government starts picking winners and losers by race, you don’t get justice. You get Martin Luther King, Jr. rolling in his grave. You get South Africa with better bagels. And you get a whole bunch of angry, poor, and divided New Yorkers.
