When asked on The Root whether he’d support cash reparations for Black New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani said he wouldn’t rule it out: “Here in New York City, we were very complicit.” The mayor promised an answer once the city’s Commission on Racial Equity reports back in 2027. Slightly inflammatory and highly performative, his answer hit his sweet spot perfectly. He is teasing his supporters with a radical, racialized policy that has no price tag and no implementation plan, just outrage.
Zohran Mamdani is a better content creator than mayor. He knows exactly which topics will generate clicks, articles and outrage. That’s a valuable skill for an influencer or a campaigner — earned media is the best priced media, but less so for a mayor who actually has to govern a major American city. His Instagram-friendly agenda – rent freezes, city-run grocery stores, the second-home tax – made for great social media. But it’s all running into the real world, and the disconnect is starting to show.
Reparations should be a non-starter for any serious person
He got his rent freeze rammed through the Rent Guidelines Board, and rents have never been higher. A little less Chomsky and a little more Friedman might have taught him something about supply and demand, and how to leverage the roughly 50,000 vacant apartments the city could get back on the market if landlords were allowed to recoup the cost of mandatory upgrades and zoning compliance.
His city-run grocery store is boy-meets-reality at its finest: the citywide pilot of five stores is projected to cost up to $70 million and won’t fully open for three years when it promises to sell goods at 30 percent discount. The immigrant grocers he plans to undercut – men and women running bodegas and delis on 2 percent margins, employing New Yorkers, and absorbing the shoplifting the city won’t prosecute – are now preparing to sue him. They have to live in reality.
His pied-à-terre tax likely chased off the city’s largest taxpayer, Ken Griffin, and has since sent confusing assessment letters to thousands of full-time residents who now have to prove to the city that they live where they live. Negative real world consequences from poorly conceived and sloppily rolled out policies, but his base loves his feisty eat-the-rich energy when he taps on the video screen while doxxing Griffin or sassily tells New Yorkers hit with a new tax “you’ve got mail.”
Reparations should be a non-starter for any serious person. Once you accept that the sins of a past group can be billed to present individuals, who didn’t commit them, and paid to individuals who didn’t suffer them, you’ve built a machine with no off switch. Mamdani may or may not know this, but he certainly does not care. The idea of reparations serves his agenda. No serious discussion needed.
And our nation has been having a serious discussion about redressing the wrongs of slavery for a long time now. What is affirmative action if not reparations? The students who got into academic institutions from prep schools to universities that they wouldn’t have gotten into on the numbers alone have been paid – handsomely. The promotions that went to candidates who weren’t the most qualified person in the room, because the room needed to look a certain way – that’s reparations too. It’s not always framed as such, not time-limited, not audited, but it is a real transfer of real opportunity running for several generations now. The individuals who benefited aren’t to blame; most never asked for the asterisk. But the country has picked up a bill for it that nobody itemized, and the currency wasn’t just dollars, but trust in our institutions.
Justice Clarence Thomas in his Grutter v. Bollinger dissent said racial preferences cast a “cloud of inferiority” over qualified black students and professionals, forcing them to carry a doubt about their own credentials they never should have had to answer for. But it is not just black students and professionals who have to grapple with the downside of our nation’s tortured schemes to atone for past wrongs. It’s one thing to suspect a bloviating HR professional got their job because of affirmative action, but what about your surgeon? Or the pilot on your next flight? Americans who want to return to a merit based selection and promotion scheme have a legitimate request that is hard enough to discuss within today’s DEI framework. It’s made nearly impossible when politicians like Mamdani suggest that we now need cash reparations.
Mamdani isn’t interested in any of this. He isn’t trying to rebuild trust or engineer transparency back into institutions that have lost it; he’s not, by disposition, a builder at all. He’s the product of the new left that would rather watch the country burn than do the slower, less glamorous work of repairing it. Talk of reparations fits his worldview precisely because it keeps the story simple: America bad, white people guilty, grievance permanent. It stirs the passions and settles nothing.
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