New York City is one of the most opportunity-rich places on earth. It has attracted generations of immigrants of every race and creed, often arriving with little more than a suitcase and the firm belief that their hard work and determination would be rewarded.
Yet Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly released Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan—a 375-page monument to grievance politics and DEI—treats this urban engine of opportunity as a machine of oppression, in which “systemic racism” explains every gap in wealth, health, and achievement.
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Released to great fanfare alongside a True Cost of Living report that dutifully slices data by race, Mamdani’s equity plan orders 45 agencies to view every budget line, hiring decision, and service through a “racial equity lens.”
The result? More than 800 strategies and 600 indicators across seven domains—including economy, housing, education, and safety—that clothe institutionalized racial preferences in the garb of justice and will cost the city untold millions of dollars.
The “missions and commitments” of city agencies are described with terms like diversity, equity, inclusion (listed separately so that the plan cannot be labeled DEI or critical theory), systemic disparity, racism, racial inequities, representation, discrimination, bias, segregation, and marginal. The agencies’ goals are to reinterpret their histories as structurally biased, to conduct extensive anti-bias trainings, to disaggregate data until disparities are all but guaranteed to appear, and then to align spending and policy decisions with predetermined equity targets, such as in hiring or minority- or women-owned business enterprise (M/WBE) procurement requirements.
Mamdani’s equity plan is not the product of neutral analysis. It is a framework that presumes its conclusions and then operationalizes them. The result will be a city government less flexible and empirically oriented, one virtually obligated to see every outcome and process from a racial perspective.
Searching keyword frequency offers insight into the plan’s identity hierarchy: “race,” including its variants “racist,” “racial,” and “racism,” appears 751 times. “Black” appears 189 times, “Latin” and “Hispanic” 97 times, “color” and “white” 49, “Asian” 27, and “Jew” or “Jewish” just once.
In a sweeping, discrimination-obsessed government plan, a single, cursory mention of the group most disproportionately affected by bias attacks is striking. Jews have made up the largest share of hate-crime victims in New York City since 2000, when systematic tracking began. In recent years, even amid waves of attacks against Asians, attacks on Jews accounted for more than half of all hate-crime incidents (57 percent last year)—far in excess of the Jewish proportion of New York City residents.
The word “merit” also gets but a single mention in the equity plan, relating to the New York State Civil Service Law requirement that candidates take a test to determine their qualifications for many jobs. The plan notes that this requirement reduced some groups’ “representation” in various positions. This suggests Mamdani’s readiness to favor identity-based characteristics over individual merit in civil service hiring. Dumbing down the test, for example, would align with the plan’s stated aim to produce equal employment outcomes across identity groups, reducing “gaps” without regard to actual performance in order to reach the goal of “equitable hiring.”
This approach would undermine the very systems that once drove the city’s growth. Past attempts to convert screened schools and specialized high schools into racial spoils systems—to the particular disadvantage of high-achieving Asian students—illustrate the pattern. Asian households have closed wealth gaps faster than any other group despite facing discrimination in admissions, contracting, and lending. The equity plan attributes this performance solely to “structural” barriers while downplaying culture, family structure, two-parent households, and emphasis on education.
Mamdani’s plan may come under legal challenge. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon has said that it “sounds fishy/illegal.” Defenders of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 42 U.S.C.§ 1981 will take particular note. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court established that any governmental use of race as a classification must pass the high bar of strict scrutiny, serve a compelling interest, be narrowly tailored, and use race only as a last resort, without quotas or racial balancing. The equity plan’s oft-repeated goal of reaching 30 percent M/BWE utilization is certainly suspect: in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989), the Supreme Court overruled Richmond’s 30 percent minority set-aside. In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (1995), the Court ruled that government racial classifications must pass strict scrutiny.
Racial equity plans don’t build generational wealth—they redistribute resentment. They don’t heal historical wounds—they reopen them for political profit. Mayor Mamdani has given us a 375-page exhibit demonstrating that his administration sees New Yorkers as racial blocs to be managed, not individual citizens to be served.
The plan invites public feedback through May 6. All New Yorkers who believe in individual dignity over group grievance should respond. They should demand color-blind policies that judge people by character and conduct, not their Census category; schools that teach reading and math to every kid and don’t hold back high achievers; contracts that get awarded to those making the best bids, not those with the “right” skin tone; and policies that promote public safety free of racial scorekeeping. New York should reclaim the original meaning of “affirmative action,” as used in President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925: “equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”
New York City’s greatness, like America’s, was built by strivers who insisted on being measured by their achievements, not their ancestry. The Mamdani administration wants to undo that equation in New York. We shouldn’t let it happen.