Mamdani Hopes Racial Agitation Succeeds Where ‘Affordability’ Has Failed

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t be the first mayor of New York City to harbor contempt for the municipality and its residents. He may, however, be the first to commodify that scorn and sell it back to the public.

 

“New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression,” read the document that outlines Mamdani’s “preliminary citywide racial equity plan.” The mayor’s chief equity officer, the “racial justice strategist” Afua Atta-Mensah, explained that the “plan was born from when New Yorkers were in the streets calling for justice.” By that, she presumably means the riotous mania that overtook the United States in the demonic year 2020. Given the details of the plan, its inauspicious provenance makes perfect sense.

 

The New York Post provides some bullet points:

 

·         Increasing the number of city teachers who “receive professional learning in implicit bias and culturally relevant pedagogy.”

 

·         Calls for a public-school curriculum that reflects “the diversity of the families and communities.”

 

·         Demanding “anti-racism training for City government staff” to help workers “combat racial discrimination in the workplace.”

 

·         Requiring the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to “ensure racial equity is considered in evaluating 100 percent of new proposals” for construction projects.

 

According to the New York Times, the Mamdani administration went so far as to scrub any reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the initiative to avoid triggering Trump administration officials. Somehow, this ingenious act of deception failed.

 

But that’s not the only obfuscatory aspect of Mamdani’s ploy. “The True Cost of Living Measure offers an honest account of what it actually costs to live in this city — and who is being left behind,” the mayor said last week. “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.”

 

Ah. So, we’re to believe that Mamdani’s “affordability” agenda has been frustrated by the pervasive racial hostilities that supposedly persist in New York City. The full flowering of the human condition cannot be achieved in his or any other municipality before city officials manage to extirpate racial hatreds from the hearts of city residents and break down the vestigial prejudices that serve to keep the city’s minorities down.

 

It’s convenient for the mayor that this initiative has taken center stage just as Mamdani’s constituents have become increasingly discouraged by the administration’s abandonment of one campaign trail promise after another.

 

The city is broke, Mamdani explained earlier this year. That condition could, he warned, imperil his most expensive priorities. Among them, implementing free child-care services, a $30-per-hour minimum wage, and city-run grocery stores. “I’m absolutely committed to making buses fast and free,” Mamdani assured Politico reporters in an interview published Wednesday. But that’s not going to happen in 2026. That walk back comes as Mamdani supporters fume over the mayor’s abandonment of his pledges to mandate a reduction in the size of public-school classes and to expand access to city-funded housing vouchers.

 

Mamdani’s sudden encounter with the city’s fiscal realities has taken the campaign trail shine off his erstwhile profligacy, but his pullback from some of these initiatives is by no means undesirable. Likewise, balancing the interests of his radical constituents against the political capital reserved by the NYPD seems to have convinced the mayor to put his anti-policing initiatives on the back burner. Good! And yet, the progressives to whom Mamdani is beholden need something to keep them active. The enduring scourge of racism and its insidious capacity to derail even the most commendable reforms will have to do.

 

Most New Yorkers aren’t so easily distracted. A new Emerson College Polling/PIX11 survey of city residents found that the new mayor has a mere 43 percent job approval rating. Even fewer New Yorkers (41 percent) say the city is on the “right track.” Nearly 60 percent disagree. On the issues, Mamdani enjoys the support of a majority of New Yorkers on “childcare” alone. When it comes to the city’s budget — Mamdani’s biggest liability in this poll — most New Yorkers back additional taxes on the wealthy, but they object to Mamdani using the means at his disposal (like rising property taxes) to extract their wealth. New Yorkers want to see Albany squeeze the rest of the state to pay for the city’s priorities. After all, that’s what Mamdani told them he would deliver.

 

As it happens, he can’t. New Yorkers will have to seek solace in the notion that their hopelessly racist neighbors and their city’s legacy of bigotry and hatred have thwarted all their wildest dreams. That may be cold comfort, given the mayor’s sky-high promises. But it’s the best he can do.