NYC Mayor Mamdani Commits to Taxing New York City Residents to Pay Reparations for Slavery

New York City dwellers can expect another big boost in their taxes if yet another giveaway backed by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is approved.

The latest scheme from the red Mayor: reparations for slavery.

During an interview with far-left “journalist” Charles Blow for The Root, a website that provides “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture,” Mamdani backed paying reparations to blacks who were never slaves

Legacy Must Be Repaired

The interview was more of a tongue bath than a hard-hitting back-and-forth meant to put the close-to-communist mayor in the hot seat. Blow’s first question: “You have been mayor for a little over 200 days. … What campaign promise so far are you proudest of already accomplishing?”

That isn’t exactly what Blow might ask President Donald Trump. But in any event, the former New York Times columnist read back to Mamdani his campaign’s statement on reparations, a leftist obsession making headway in California, where slavery was illegal.

“When you were running for mayor, you submitted a written statement to a reparations convening that read in part, ‘New York City participated actively in the slave trade and furthered its legacy through racist institutions, policies, and laws. The city should reconcile and repair this legacy of slavery, stolen wealth, and discrimination,’” Blow said:

You added that you were proud to support the new reparations commission examining Wall Street’s complicity in the slave trade. One of these commissions is set to release its final report next summer. If a commission studying reparations in this city recommended cash reparations for people impacted in New York City, would you support that recommendation?

Blow’s Take

Slavery has “impacted” no one in New York, but that aside, Blow wasn’t merely seeking Mamdani’s position. The former Times scribe is a reparations booster. In 2019, he laid out his case with something of a history lesson for the Times’ readers.

“For a vast majority of black people’s time in this country, they have been suffering under an oppression operating on all levels of government — local, state and federal,” he averred:

It is absolutely a good idea for America to think about how to make that right, to think about how to repair the damage it did, to think about how to do what is morally just.

And the idea that too much time has passed makes a mockery of morality. You can’t use having not done something at a better time as an argument that a later time can never be the right time.

Furthermore, this is not about individual guilt or shame but rather about collective responsibility and redemption. America needs to set its soul right.

The paying of reparations isn’t at all an outlandish idea. To the contrary, it’s an exceedingly reasonable proposition. Most of all, it’s right.

Blow didn’t discuss the trillions of state and federal tax dollars expended in majority black cities during the past six decades. Nor did he discuss whether non-black Americans deserve reparations for, say, the George Floyd riots, or the rampant black crime, violence, and destruction in those cities that require even more tax expenditures.

And Blow would, of course, receive some of those reparations. That isn’t to imply he’s angling for some free money for himself.

All that notwithstanding, Blow asked the question to ensure that Mamdani hadn’t changed his mind and still supported Blow’s harebrained scheme. The Ugandan immigrant — who pines for “seizing the means of production” — did not disappoint:

First, I want to say that I stand by what I submitted. It’s the truth. It’s not a personal assessment. And we often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country. 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, but I can tell you that this is critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.

Race Commission

The push for reparations began with the city’s Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), created in 2022 “to hold NYC government accountable to advance racial equity in government operations and to increase community voice in government decision making.”

In turn, two laws, Nos. 91 and 92 of 2024, mandate the study of reparations:

Local Law 91 requires CORE to create a public process for truth, healing, and reconciliation. This process will offer New Yorkers a way to publicly acknowledge the history and harm of slavery and its legacies in New York City, and the harms caused by it. …

Local Law 92 requires CORE to study how NYC government contributed to slavery and the harms caused by its legacies.

In November 2025, CORE published its 27-page progress report, Advancing Truth, Healing, Reconciliation, and Reparations in New York City. There followed a “progress update” in January. New Yorkers can be forgiven for holding onto their wallets after the next five stages are complete:

• January 1, 2027  — Second progress report for Reparations Study;
• January 15, 2027  — Second progress report for Truth, Healing and Reconciliation Planning Process;
• June 19, 2027 — Final report for Truth, Healing and Reconciliation Planning Process;
• July 1, 2027 — Final report for Reparations Study; and,
• June 19, 2028 —  Implementation for Truth, Healing and Reconciliation Plan.

Corporations are not exempt from the CORE’s historical sleuthing.

They and city dwellers have approximately two years to escape the Big Apple before Mamdani and his radicals pick their pockets to hand over money for putative crimes they didn’t commit to people who were never victims.

Even before Mamdani was elected, the city had lost $12 billion in tax revenues because of the millionaires who fled the city between 2013 and 2022, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reported in May.

That exodus will almost certainly continue.