Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this week that he supported reparations efforts in New York City but that it was too early to commit to making monetary payouts to descendants of slavery.
In a recent interview on The Root, Mr. Mamdani was asked whether he would support cash reparations if the city’s Commission on Racial Equity, which is currently studying the matter, recommended them. The mayor said he would have to wait for the commission’s report but acknowledged the city’s complicity in slavery.
“We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country,” Mr. Mamdani told the former New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in the interview. “Here in New York City, we were very complicit. And so, I look forward to whatever those findings are.”
“I can’t give you an answer in advance of them,” the mayor continued, “but I can tell you that this is critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.”
He told Mr. Blow that he stood by a pledge, written when he was running for mayor, that he would support the descendants of slavery in, as the pledge states, “rectifying historical discrimination” and “repairing ongoing inequalities.”
In another interview this week on Sirius XM’s Urban Views channel, Mr. Mamdani said that “if we are taking an honest and accurate approach to what New York City’s role was, you will see that complicity is something that cannot be debated.”
When asked about the mayor’s recent comments, Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for the mayor, said Mr. Mamdani’s statements spoke for themselves.
There are currently separate city and state commissions studying reparations and reconciliation. In 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law creating the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies to study the legacy of slavery and the ongoing impact on descendants dealing with extreme wealth gaps and other social issues that are the consequences of the loss of generational wealth. The group is not expected to release its findings for at least two years.
The New York City Commission on Racial Equity, created in 2022 by public ballot, is also studying reparations and creating “a public process for truth, healing and reconciliation” that will offer New Yorkers a way to “publicly acknowledge the history and harm of slavery,” according to the commission.
The group is expected to issue a report on its plans for the truth, healing and reconciliation process next June and the reparations study the following month.
The Commission on Racial Equity has recently clashed with Mr. Mamdani regarding the release of the city’s first legally mandated racial equity report.
The commission criticized the administration for not including crucial elements required by city law, such as a plan to increase racial equity in budgeting and policymaking. It also took issue with the deletion of references to diversity, equity and inclusion in the report, done to avoid antagonizing the Trump administration, which has systematically dismantled diversity and equity initiatives.
Tyrik Washington, a strategist for the commission who is helping to lead the reparations study, said the mayor was right to not jump ahead of the commission as it carefully studies the issue and develops a plan for reparations and a legal and educational arm to fight for them.
“You can’t talk about the question of affordability without talking about the racial wealth gap,” Mr. Washington said. “You can’t talk about question of the racial wealth gap without talking about reparations.”
“You don’t get Mamdani without the fight for reparations,” he added.
Keris Lové, the organizing strategist for New Yorkers for Reparations, a statewide coalition, says that many people regard slavery as a “footnote that happened, instead of being recognized as the root of everything that was built afterward.”
She said she preferred an approach in which cash reparations and other changes, such as investments in housing or education, were both on the table.
“We know that there’s immediate needs right now,” said Ms. Lové. “We also know that if we don’t fix the structural issues, the next generation of Black New Yorkers will still find themselves at the bottom of the caste system.”
New York was a focal point of slavery in the country. New York City had more enslaved Africans before the American Revolution than any other U.S. city except Charleston, S.C., according to the governor’s office.
New York is the financial capital of the world in part because of the benefit it derived from the slave trade. Enslaved Africans were traded at a market on Wall Street. Banking, insurance and shipping also flourished in the city because of chattel slavery. New York abolished slavery in 1827.
Anthony Vidal Torres, the director of communications at Get Free, a group dedicated to making reparations a national issue, said, “We know that entities like Citibank, New York Life Insurance and some others that have been here since the early days of the colony that became New York directly made their founding profits on the financing of enslavement.”
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