Mamdani’s Reparations

New York is inching closer to a cash reparations program for slavery, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani cheering on the effort. “We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively” confined “to certain geographic areas of the country,” Hizzoner harrumphs. “Here in New York, we were very complicit.” He adds that he looks forward to hearing the recommendations of Governor Kathy Hochul’s reparations commission, which has finished its hearings.Mr. Mamdani told digital magazine the Root that he holds to his campaign vow to aid slaves’ descendants by “rectifying historical discrimination” and “repairing ongoing inequalities.” Of the commission’s work, he added, “this is critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.” The commission is due to release its recommendations on reparations next summer, conveniently after the election for governor. Yet Mr. Mamdani’s remarks suggest an effort to lay the groundwork for reparations. A strategist for the commission, Tyrek Washington, tells the Times “you can’t talk about the question of the racial wealth gap without talking about reparations.” The Times is helping pave the way for the scheme by reporting that “New York was a focal point of slavery,” and “the financial capital of the world in part because of the benefit it derived from the slave trade.”It’s not our intention here to ignore that slavery was a scourge here in New York. Enslaved persons in 1790 made up some 6 percent of the Empire State’s population. Yet that proportion was “minuscule compared to the number held in the South,” the Gilder Lehman Institute reports, where about one-third of residents were in bondage. New York, too, in 1799 enacted a law that led to the gradual abolition of slavery, a goal that was achieved by 1827.The story of slavery in the Empire State cannot be told, either, without crediting the nearly half-million New Yorkers — the most of any state — who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Tens of thousands of them died. The Republican leader in the state senate, Rob Ortt, has said that “reparations of slavery were paid with the blood and lives” of the New Yorkers who fought in that war to preserve the Union and, ultimately, to free the slaves. Lincoln grasped that the Union’s “honored dead” had fallen in a “cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” He suggested the war’s deaths were a kind of expiation, that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Today’s activists are more eager to view the matter in terms of dollars and cents. To that end Mrs. Hochul stresses New York’s “role in benefiting from the institution of slavery.” That kind of talk, these columns have warned, “is code for going after the corporations, or their successors, that did antebellum business with slave states.” There are in the press insinuations of liability for companies like JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and New York Life Insurance — not to mention state taxpayers. In the months ahead, count on talk of reparations, and monetary payouts, to rise in crescendo with Mr. Mamdani at the head of the chorus.

Mamdani’s Reparations

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