New York’s Experiment in Governing by Racial Outcomes

America is about to find out what happens when a municipal government stops merely measuring racial disparities and instead begins organizing its decisions around them.

New York City’s Racial Equity Plan, released Sept. 1 by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, is the first citywide racial-equity framework in the Big Apple’s history. It implements a 2022 voter-approved Charter amendment requiring citywide and agency-specific racial-equity blueprints.

Under the plan, 45 agencies will examine racial outcomes across housing, employment, contracting, health, public safety, and other areas of government, touching everything from budgeting and staffing to service delivery and land use.

They will break data down by race and ethnicity, identify disparities, and use that information in shaping policies and allocating resources. Among the plan’s recurring themes are “budget reallocation” and “targeted investment,” along with directing government attention toward historically underserved communities.

As noble as all this might sound to some, the danger is that if this model spreads beyond New York, more governments could move from policing racial discrimination to trying to engineer racial outcomes, with unequal results being used as an excuse for government intervention.

To be sure, there is an obvious reason for officials to collect racial data. If a city agency is discriminating against black applicants, Latino contractors, Asian employees, or anyone else because of race, officials should know about it and put a stop to it.

But New York is going an enormous step further and making racial outcomes a measure of whether government itself is succeeding.

A key civil-rights principle has always been that government should treat people equally without regard to race. But Mamdani’s approach says that when racial groups experience different outcomes, government should try to narrow the gap.

A system designed to combat racial discrimination can therefore end up making race a permanent consideration in government itself.

That approach sits uneasily with the direction the Supreme Court has taken on race.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the 2023 ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted an earlier Supreme Court ruling saying that the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause is “doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.”

Then he put it plainly in his own words: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

In 2007, in a case involving race-conscious public-school assignments, Roberts wrote the line that perhaps best captures his vision: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

New York’s plan does not mean that every policy adopted under it will discriminate on the basis of race or violate the Constitution. Collecting racial statistics is not the same as giving someone a benefit because of race. Nor is directing resources toward a poor neighborhood necessarily a racial classification.

But the real test comes when the numbers do not line up.

Suppose one racial group receives fewer city contracts, earns less money, or uses a particular government service less frequently than another. What happens next?

The plan says agencies should measure disparities, determine where government can make a difference, change policies that are not producing equitable outcomes, and use the core levers of government—including budgets, staffing, services, and contracting—to pursue those goals.

Here is the problem: A disparity is not proof of discrimination.

Income, education, age, immigration patterns, geography, occupation, family circumstances, and many other factors can produce different outcomes among groups. Even the city’s own plan acknowledges that racial inequities can result from complex and longstanding conditions that cannot be changed by a single agency or policy.

Once reducing disparity becomes an official measure of success, however, the pressure will be to make the numbers move. A statistical gap can begin to look like a problem that government must correct even before its causes are fully understood.

And that raises a question the plan never really answers: How much racial parity is enough?

If one group receives 10% fewer contracts, is government obliged to intervene? What about 5%? If income, hiring, or housing outcomes remain unequal after one policy change, does that justify another?

When equal outcomes become the benchmark, there is no obvious stopping point.

And that is precisely the irony that lies at the heart of New York’s experiment: A policy intended to make race matter less could end up requiring government to sort, measure, and govern people based on the criteria of race.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Continue reading...

[ H/T The Daily Signal ]