Last week Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a “preliminary citywide racial equity plan” chock full of divisive, dangerous and even deadly ideas.
He’s given the public 30 days to voice their concerns.
Don’t hold back.
This plan will expose non-minority city employees to a hostile work environment, put children at greater risk from abusive parents, and hand out tax dollars as reparations to enable “communities harmed by racism to purchase government and non-government land.”
That’s just for starters.
Under this 375-page plan, the city’s entire hiring, promotion and spending apparatus will revolve around group identities — in a misguided effort to even the score for alleged past injustices against racial and sexual minorities, women, the disabled and immigrants.
Equity will be at the core of how Mamdani’s City Hall will “allocate resources, hire and support our workforce, procure goods and services, design policies and deliver programs and exercise land use authority,” Chief Equity Officer Afua Atta-Mensah pledged.
Forget treating people as individuals: This mayor intends to set up a citywide caste system.
White and Asian city workers will be hounded in ramped-up anti-racism and implicit-bias training sessions and shamed into silence.
Employees’ salaries will be adjusted and their job descriptions revised to ensure “100% pay equity across departments by race, gender and experience.”
No mention of merit or job performance anywhere.
In a section on city contracts for the nonprofits that deliver social services, the report makes Mamdani’s target clear: White-led groups will no longer be getting business.
“White CEOs and leadership teams represent 64% and 61% of nonprofit administration, respectively, while making up only 39% of the City’s population,” the report complains.
Those “gaps in the diversity of nonprofit leadership,” it claims, are to blame for shortcomings in how the city serves the needy.
In the report’s most dangerous proposal, new official guidelines will discourage teachers, physicians and professionals from reporting suspected cases of child abuse or neglect to the city’s Administration for Child Services — just because black and Hispanic families are disproportionately reported.
More than 100 New York City children in a typical year suffer horrible deaths from mutilation, starvation, scaldings and other alleged abuse at the hands of a parent or a parent’s domestic partner.
Mamdani claims “over-reporting” is a problem — nonsense.
The problem is under-reporting: At least half those children are never brought to the attention of ACS before they’re killed.
Discouraging professionals who see the signs of abuse from reporting it will lead to even more deaths.
And the entire profession of child protective services is being commandeered by far-left ideologues more concerned with masking racial differences than actually protecting kids.
“Pulling kids out of dangerous homes isn’t racist,” explains Naomi Schaefer Riley, an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow.
“Many of the reporters are themselves people of color, so the notion that the reporting is due to racial bias is bonkers.”
Black children in this country are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children.
The city’s goal should be preventing those deaths, not hiding them.
Law enforcement officers and city residents who want criminals off the street are both in the equity plan’s crosshairs.
The report calls for reducing incarceration for criminal offenses, and for increasing “the disciplinary power of oversight bodies for law enforcement” that supposedly “cause harm to people and abuse their authority.”
To close the racial gap in employment opportunities, City Hall will literally be “distributing money to start a business.”
No criteria other than race or other immutable characteristics for who receives these taxpayer-funded handouts.
Item after item, Mamdani’s plan is an exercise in vicious reverse discrimination — and a step backward from the principles of fairness and inclusiveness that Americans are finally striving to achieve.
The US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences in higher education and its 2025 ruling against racial and gender preferences in the workplace point the nation toward a society where everyone is treated as an individual.
That’s the right direction: The best way to eliminate racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race. Period.
Major companies like Home Depot, Goldman Sachs and Lowe’s are rolling back their DEI programs and scrapping hiring goals based on race, ethnicity or gender.
Even Disney is jettisoning its DEI obsessions of recent years, once again addressing patrons as “ladies and gentlemen” in announcements that offended no one but leftist scolds.
It’s time America ends these distinctions, whether virtuous or invidious in intent.
Mamdani’s equity plan should be rejected by all fair-minded New Yorkers who want to build a better city — together.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
