New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in an interview with “The Root,” said he stood by a statement he wrote when running for mayor that said the city participated actively in the slave trade, and should reconcile and repair this legacy.
“I stand by what I submitted. It’s the truth. It’s not a personal assessment,” Mamdani said in the interview with journalist Charles M. Blow.
NYC’s Commission on Racial Equity is looking into the topic of reparations and preparing a report on them. Asked by Blow whether he would support cash reparations if the commission suggested them, Mamdani said he wouldn’t give an answer in advance of the report being published.
However, he added the matter is “critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.”
“We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country,” Mamdani said. “Here in New York City, we were very complicit.”
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