A contingent of black leaders in New York has warned that socialist policies pushed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America’s star candidate of 2025, would disproportionately harm black communities.
Mounting debate over the DSA’s influence in municipal government comes as Mamdani is about to take over the largest city in the country as chief executive. His rise has drawn scrutiny from more centrist figures on the political Left who fear that the DSA’s revolutionary-left agenda could inadvertently harm vulnerable black residents, a demographic that the DSA claims to champion in the name of racial justice.
Chantel Wright, a bishop and local faith leader, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, “There is no clear black agenda for the people who voted for him. It’s really not clearly defined what his position is as it pertains to black people.”
“I am just hoping that there will be greater clarity as to all of those who jumped on the Mamdani bandwagon,” Wright said. “What is he really planning to do for our community, making sure that we are looked after and taken care of?”
Wright mentioned the Mamdani transition team’s lack of outreach to the black community, despite leaders within the community reaching out several times for a seat at the table.
Urging the inclusion of all constituents in the policymaking process, Wright said, “New York is very, very intricate. It’s a mosaic. And when you think that you can leave one of the tiles out, you’re sophomoric in your thinking.”
In a recent New York Daily News opinion piece, dated Dec. 4, 2025, National Black Empowerment Action Fund President Darius Jones raised concerns about whether the new mayor would implement the agenda items of the DSA, whose policy vision he said has “consistently clashed with the needs and dismissed the interests of the very Black and Brown communities that are most affected by the outcomes of City Hall.”
“For years the DSA has promoted ideas that sound righteous in theory but unravel when applied to the communities that bear the brunt of policy failures,” Jones said, asserting that socialists “borrow the language of justice and liberation from our history while pushing proposals that rarely account for our safety, our schools, our daily lives, or our economic reality.”
His strongly worded article took aim, in particular, at the DSA’s positions on public safety.
Mamdani has publicly distanced himself from the DSA’s calls to abolish the police, but, in the past, he said on Twitter that the city’s police department should be “defunded” and “dismantled” altogether. While running for mayor, Mamdani reportedly walked back anti-police posts he had made during the 2020 racial justice uprisings.
“Madness,” Wright said of abolishing the police. “Over our dead bodies.”
Wright, a Harlem resident, noted how she and other community advocates have worked to build relationships with the New York Police Department. “Who’s going to suffer the most?” she wondered. “So if you abolish it altogether, communities that already have high crime rates are going to be warfare zones.”
Jones said that DSA policies, such as eliminating the NYPD’s gang database, decriminalizing prostitution, and legalizing dangerous drugs, would just increase crime, drug abuse, and sex trafficking in poor neighborhoods.
As for the city’s gang database, which opponents consider “discriminatory” against certain racial groups, Jones said, “Many parents and neighborhood leaders see it as a tool that can prevent violence before it reaches their block. Reforms may be necessary, but dismantling it outright would be reckless.”
Other black religious leaders in New York have also voiced opposition against the DSA’s policy priorities.
“The DSA wants to defund the police and decriminalize hard drugs,” Pastor Zidde Hamatheite of the Wayside Baptist Church in Brooklyn previously told the New York Post. “That’s not progress, that’s surrender. And it’s wrong for black communities in New York.”
In the same article, Rev. James Kilgore of the Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem criticized the DSA for opposing school choice: “The DSA wants to defund some of the only high-quality public schools we have access to and evict more than 130,000 black and brown children from those few high-quality public schools. How is that even remotely progressive?”
On the campaign trail, Mamdani promised that, if elected, he would oppose the expansion of charter schools, which are publicly funded and largely educate minority, low-income students from working-class households. Charter schools operate independently from traditional school districts, often offering higher-level curriculum compared to their public school counterparts. Studies show that disadvantaged students in urban areas tend to perform better at these types of educational alternatives.
“I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” Mamdani said in a candidate survey ahead of the Democratic primaries in June 2025. In the Staten Island Advance questionnaire, Mamdani declared that he even opposes charter schools sharing space on city-owned property and further vowed to audit ones that are co-located in city Department of Education buildings, suggesting that they receive too much public funding.
“For those already co-located,” Mandani pledged, “my administration would undertake a comprehensive review of charter school funding to address the unevenness of our system.”
Many black leaders told the media that they were offended by Mamdani claiming to be “African American” when he had applied to attend Columbia University. Mamdani, who is of Indian ancestry but was born in Uganda, checked off both the “Black or African American” and “Asian” boxes regarding his race on his 2009 college application.
Critics said Mamdani co-opted a black identity to further his professional career, suspecting that he tried to pass himself off as African American to gain an advantage in the admissions process, courtesy of Columbia’s race-conscious affirmative action policies.
“The African American identity is not a checkbox of convenience,” then-New York Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement after the information from Mamdani’s application was leaked in July 2025. “It’s a history, a struggle, and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive.”
“You don’t get to be black when it’s convenient for you,” Wright said of Mamdani. You don’t understand the burden we bear. How dare you use that to your advantage for some sort of privilege?”
Wright said that Mamdani has never directly apologized to the black community for misrepresenting himself.
“Who do you think you are, thinking that you could do that and then turn around and then act like we don’t exist? Shame on you,” said Wright, a staunch supporter of Adams, who had entered the general election as an independent but withdrew and endorsed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
In October 2025, Cuomo’s campaign posted a video that contained interviews with black New Yorkers about their thoughts on the Mamdani admissions scandal.
“You’re a Ugandan Indian. OK? You’re not black!” one black New Yorker answered, saying that Mamdani was trying to use “the black card” to get in.
“Why would you make yourself seem like something you’re not?” another asked, suggesting that Mamdani “impersonated” a black person.
Mamdani told the New York Times, which had first reported on his college application based on hacked documents shared with the newspaper, that he does not consider himself either black or African American, rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said that the application did not have a category that fully represented the complexity of his ethnic origins, so he marked multiple boxes, working within the limited options available to him.
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” Mamdani said. A section of the application allowed students to add “more specific information where relevant,” and Mamdani said that he wrote “Ugandan.”
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani was eventually not accepted at Columbia and ended up attending Bowdoin College, where he majored in Africana studies.
Months before the application bombshell, Mamdani said that it would be “misleading” for him to self-identify as African American. A resurfaced social media clip captured him making the acknowledgment on camera as he was questioned about his heritage.
“I’m an Indian, Ugandan, New Yorker,” Mamdani told black performance artist Crackhead Barney when she approached him on the street in April 2025. Asked if he would ever claim African American status, Mamdani insisted, “No, I would not. I’m proud to be Ugandan, but I think that is misleading.”
“We don’t trust him,” Wright said following the revelations.
Wright also characterized Mamdani’s promises of government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free rides on city buses as snake-oil salesman pitches.
“None of it makes any sense,” Wright, 60, told the Washington Examiner. “First of all, if you promise a free bus ride, who’s going to pay for it? Because the buses still have to have gasoline or electricity. They still have to be maintained. Where’s that money coming from?”
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor of government at Columbia University, and his family reportedly lived close to campus in taxpayer-subsidized housing provided by the Ivy League college.
“It’s all great and fanciful for people who don’t have real connections to black people,” Jones said.
Jones, who was former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s deputy national political director during his 2020 presidential bid, has been a vocal critic among black voices speaking out against Mamdani and informing black New Yorkers about the DSA’s hard-left platform.
Leading the charge in these awareness efforts is Jones’s nonprofit organization, the National Black Empowerment Action Fund, a national black advocacy group operating in major metropolitan areas across America, including New York, that are known to be political, civic, and business hubs for black communities. Fighting for “common-sense” policies that empower black communities to thrive, the NBEAF is dedicated to the economic, educational, and social uplift of black America.
In the lead-up to the New York mayoral election, the NBEAF launched a $2 million ad campaign against Mamdani, warning voters that the DSA’s agenda “threatens” decades of social and economic progress achieved by black Americans throughout U.S. history.
The anti-Mamdani ads, which were billed as “A Message From the Black Community,” accused the DSA of “insulting our intelligence” and “taking us for granted.”
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“Instead of claiming to speak for us and acting like you know what’s best for us, try listening to us!” one of the ads, directed at DSA, said.
The Washington Examiner contacted Mamdani’s campaign and the DSA for comment.