New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani floated cutting checks to black New Yorkers to atone for the city’s involvement in slavery. But transforming the descendants of immigrants into historical perpetrators, and millions of black New Yorkers into victims, would be historically incoherent and legally perilous.
When asked whether he would support cash reparations for those affected by slavery if recommended by the New York City Commission on Racial Equity, Mamdani said New York was “very complicit” and that he looked forward to the commission’s “critically important” findings.
It has become a rite of passage for progressive public officials to establish racial-reckoning commissions. They propose relief for black people, whom they view as victims of systemic racism, often in the form of cash payments or housing grants.
California was the first state to form an official reparations task force. The body released a 500-page report charging the state with systemic racism, as demonstrated by disparate outcomes between white and black Californians. Illinois, Maryland, and New York state have done the same, with little follow-through.
Evanston, Illinois, was the first municipality to follow through on reparations promises. Black residents and their descendants who faced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 can receive $25,000 in unrestricted cash payments.
New York had the largest enslaved population among northern states in 1790, and 42% of the state’s households enslaved at least one person in 1703 — a rate second only to Charleston, South Carolina. The Empire State’s outsize figures were perhaps a consequence of the government-sanctioned slave market New York City established near Wall Street in 1711, as Mamdani mentioned in the interview.
Unsurprisingly, Southern states eclipsed New York’s enslaved population of 21,324 in 1790. Enslaved people accounted for 43% of the population in South Carolina, 39% in Virginia, and 35% in Georgia, compared with 6% in New York.
Still, New York passed a gradual abolition law in 1799 that declared children born after July 4, 1799, to enslaved women legally free, though they remained bound to indentured servitude until their late 20s. Later, an 1817 law designated July 4, 1827, as the emancipation date for all enslaved people in the state. New York became a significant corridor for self-emancipated slaves fleeing the South and was indispensable during the Civil War. It contributed more troops, money, and military supplies to the Union than any other state.
New York’s history with slavery is complicated. Will its later acts of abolition, refuge, and wartime sacrifice reduce the cash reparations it supposedly owes the descendants of the enslaved?
In 1790, before Founding Father Gouverneur Morris and others had even devised Manhattan’s famous street grid, about 33,000 people lived in New York City. Today, the sprawling metropolis is home to more than 8.5 million people. A cash transfer from the city’s white population, many of whom bear no relation to slaveholders, to black residents, including many whose families arrived during the Great Migration to escape the Jim Crow South, would make little sense. City Hall imposing a tax on the entire population, including the one-third of residents who are foreign-born, would invite even more bewilderment.
As for black recipients, would immigrants be included? A little more than 1 in 4 black residents in the metropolitan area is foreign-born. If you are a black American with ancestral ties to slavery but your family moved to New York after the Civil War, are you entitled to a full check? Perhaps only a fraction, in the form of housing grants, as compensation for redlining in the 1930s?
Before victims of Gotham’s systemic racism anticipate Evanston-style cash reparations, they ought to follow the Justice Department’s ongoing legal battle against the Illinois city. The Civil Rights Division alleges that cash payments and housing assistance intended to alleviate the effects of racism violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release. “Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal.”
GROCERY STORE SOCIALISM ALREADY FAILING IN CHICAGO
The Washington Examiner asked Mamdani’s office whether New York would fare any better in court.
Mamdani said in his interview that New York’s history deserves honesty. He is right. But when the city’s reparations commission delivers its recommendations next summer, he should explain why residents with little connection to New York’s slaveholders must compensate residents with little connection to those enslaved here.