Bad news: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s just-released Racial Equity Plan is promising to address “disparities” in racial outcomes based on a dangerously flawed understanding their causes — and seemingly with a distinctly anti-American solution: racial favoritism.
Good news: There’s little sign, based on the plan and on his record, he’ll actually deliver on his promises.
Start with the fact that America was founded on the principle of equal opportunity, not outcomes. Only minds twisted by the fantasy of a socialist utopia would expect outcomes to be the same for everyone, despite pivotal differences between them — most notably, the effort they put in.
And would then resort to blatantly unfair, unlawful and wholly ineffective means in supposed pursuit of that equality.
Remember, the nation’s successful civil rights movement was premised on securing equal rights, not outcomes, for blacks and other racial minorities, and later, women.
Equal opportunity was, is and always should be the ideal.
The Mamdani plan’s main mistake is that it assumes racial disparities are chiefly the result of “historical harm” — never mind that slavery ended 160 years and the civil-rights reforms rolled back most official racist policies more than 60 years ago.
Indeed, the plan sees “systemic racism” sewn into the fabric of the city’s history, governance and policies.
And then hints of addressing disparities by giving minorities an edge, in one form or another.
Fortunately, except in a few places, the report offers little meat on the bones for achieving that. It largely calls for studies, recommendations, data, etc. — as opposed to actual, immediate, concrete changes.
Unfortunately, where there is meat, it’s rancid. When it comes to “racial equity” goals set by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, for example, Naomi Schaefer Riley fumes that “reducing racial inequity trumps reducing abuse and neglect” of kids “every time.”
ACS’s emphasis on race-based approaches “will only put more children, of all races, in grave danger.”
The plan also aims to expand race-based contracting, which is unconstitutional and undermines fair, unbiased competitive bidding. The government shouldn’t combat “racial disparities” by discriminating in favor supposedly “harmed” racial groups.
Thank goodness Mamdani is generally more interested in symbols than results, as is clear from his promises for government-run grocery stores, free buses, universal child care and more.
Equity hustlers like him, who traffic in the fiction of equal outcomes, are mainly looking to profit politically from the resentments their false claims and hollow promises stoke.
Let’s hope that’s the worst of the damage his plan causes.
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