Zohran Mamdani’s racial Stalinism

New York may be the greatest city on Earth – but don’t count its mayor, Zohran Mamdani, among its fans.

According to Mamdani, New York City is little more than a cesspit of racism and white supremacy, and has been ever since it was stumbled upon by the Dutch in the 17th century. ‘New York’s history has been one of colonisation, exploitation and racial oppression’, states the mayor’s recently released Citywide Racial Equity Plan. The city’s ‘racial inequalities’, it asserts, are ‘rooted in our 400-year history’, beginning with the European settlement of New Amsterdam in 1624 and continuing unabated until, we can only suppose, Mamdani’s election as mayor in November.

The NYC mayor announced the plan in a solemn press conference on Tuesday. Supposedly a means of lowering rents and the cost of living for New Yorkers, what has emerged instead is a 350-page exegesis on the need to reorganise America’s most-populous city on racial lines. Because, in Mamdani’s circuitous logic, ‘we cannot tackle systemic racial inequity without confronting the affordability crisis head-on, and we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity’.

In mind-numbingly bureaucratic detail, the report lists seven ‘domains’ to be targeted in Mamdani’s racial corrective. This includes children, youth, adults, families, housing, healthcare and ‘rights’ – in effect, everyone and everything. In fact, the report is open about its objectives. It wants to ‘operationalise racial equity into every part of city life’ and to ‘embed racial equity in government services and systems’. Forty-five agencies – overseen by the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity, the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, and the Commission on Racial Equity – tasked with more than 800 strategies, have been enlisted in this seismic undertaking.

Indoctrination is a core part of the plan. Teachers will have to become fluent in ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’, and school curricula will need to reflect the ‘diversity of families and the city’. And that’s not all. Government staff will be drilled in anti-racism ‘training’. All new housing developments must also meet vague standards of ‘racial equity’. Businesses owned by women and minority groups will be prioritised for government contracts.

In effect, every part of New York’s local government has been mobilised to meet the alleged threat of racism. The city is now on a total war footing. ‘There cannot be true economic justice without dismantling structural racism’, cried Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice, on the launch of the report. ‘Inequity has been embedded in the foundation of our city and nation since their inception… Dismantling it requires a collective effort’, implored Afua Atta-Mensah, the equity and racial justice commissioner. ‘It is critical that we continue to examine how [children’s] lives and futures will be affected by racial inequities’, claimed Kamar Samuels, New York’s schools chancellor. The health commissioner, the building commissioner, and the department of youth and community development commissioner have all also promised to ‘eliminate disparities’ – to use the words in the report – in the Big Apple.

But is it really all that simple? Are white New Yorkers all rich, having uncontested privilege, while every other ethnic group is poor, ignorant and stigmatised? Might there even be an exception to the rule? Should New Yorkers be interested in finding one, the mayor’s office would be a good place to start.

Really, it is hard not to feel mildly amused at being lectured on inequality by a child of such immense privilege as Mamdani. He is the son of a Bollywood film director and Ivy League professor. He attended an exclusive liberal-arts college in Maine. Indeed, he seems to have spent almost his entire life in placid indolence (with the exception of three years of employment, according to the New York Post) before his election as mayor, at the age of 34.

Like many people with far too much spare time on their hands, Mamdani has developed an obsession. In his case, it is race and identity. His campaign strategy last year, besides all of the predictable cant about the ‘super rich’, boiled down to reminding as many people as possible that he is non-white and Muslim. In fact, so keen has he been to play the victim card that he has been caught out multiple times for stretching the truth to win public sympathy or to advance his own interests.

Mamdani’s mayoral acceptance speech in October further highlighted his fixation with identitarian grievances. His win, he said, was for the ‘Yemeni bodega owners’, the ‘Senegalese taxi drivers’, the ‘Uzbek nurses’ and the ‘Trinidadian line cooks’. ‘Ana minkum wa alaikum’, he told the audience, which means ‘I am from you and for you’ in Arabic. He said his win was for immigrants, the trans community and the ‘many black women Donald Trump has fired from a federal job’. ‘No more will New York City be a place where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election’, he promised. As terrible as the Citywide Racial Equity Plan may be, New Yorkers can’t say they weren’t warned.

It hardly needs to be said that Zohran Mamdani’s racial-equity plan will do nothing for New Yorkers struggling with expensive rents or stagnant pay, whether they are an hombre, an auntie or – one group conspicuously absent from the plan – a Jew. But it will suck the life out of New York, a city that was once synonymous with the American dream and the promises it held for everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

New Yorkers deserve far better than their smug, race-baiting mayor.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.