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Let's get into it:
Good old Mayor Zohran Mamdani has struck again with another socialist, identitarian plan to fix just about everything that's wrong with New York City. This one, the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan, saw all the big city agencies look at their policies and programs through the lens of critical race theory and use that lens to "identify and eliminate disparities." Of course, if you look at the world through a racism-colored lens you will see racism everywhere. That's what's going to happen here. The project to study all this was convened post-Floyd in 2022, but while the Adams administration didn't release it, the Mamdani administration hurried to do so upon taking office.
The plan demanding agencies undertake this mission references so-called systemic racism in the city, but it has to go back to the 1950s and 1960s for any specifics. Back then, Mamdani's office claims, black and immigrant New Yorkers were prevented from owning homes due to highway construction in the Bronx. The report, the Mayor's office states, "confronts the City's role in creating structural inequities." 1950 was more than 75 years ago, nearly a century, for anyone who's keeping count.
The Mayor's Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which is spearheading the effort, believes that the outcomes showing inequity between members of different racial groups necessarily mean that racism and injustice are playing. It does not account for the white New Yorkers who moved to the city with wealth and then built on it. It doesn't account for illegal immigrants or first-generation legal immigrants who came to the city with nothing and have been building from there. It just assumes that disparate outcomes mean that there were intentional thumbs on the scale towards race-based discrimination as a means to achieve those disparate outcomes.
Mamdani touted the new True Cost of Living metric that shows that the city is pretty expensive, which everyone knows. "Despite the incredible wealth of our city, our poverty rate is double that of the national average, and it is getting worse year over year," Mamdani said on Monday. "And while today's true cost of living measure confirms that the affordability crisis touches every corner of our city, we know that these effects are not applied evenly. So often it is black and brown New Yorkers who are hit the hardest.
"This preliminary racial equity plan is the first step in developing a whole of government approach to tackling that reality. It is a plan that lays out these first steps to solve decades of neglect and discrimination, and it places the work of 45 city agencies within a singular framework. Too often, the story of black and brown New Yorkers is one of being forced to stretch that same dollar that little bit further every year, as wages stagnate, as well as an exodus and exclusion continue to take place."
When asking agencies to look for racism, the ask itself is based on the premise that racism exists, and as such, agencies will make sure they find it. In fact, NYC's Chief Equity Officer Afua Atta-Menseh revealed the inspiration for the plan, namely, George Floyd. Who else?
"This plan was born during a defining moment in our city's history," Atta-Menseh said, "when New Yorkers were in the streets in the midst of a global pandemic, calling for justice, demanding accountability, and bearing witness to brutality unfolding on our streets and on our screens. In that moment, our city was asked to reckon with the deep, systemic inequities that have long shaped life here and to do better. New Yorkers across all five boroughs answered that call; their voices, their advocacy, and their persistence are what brought us to this moment. The release of the preliminary citywide Racial Equity Plan is a reflection of that collective mandate. It is not just a document, it is a commitment, a commitment to confront institutional and systemic racism within our city and to begin the work of dismantling it."
Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ already said she's going to look into it, because if there's anything that a fierce civil rights attorney cannot stand, it's discrimination and injustice.
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Libby