Mamdani economic advisor is reparations activist who says 'devaluation of Black lives' ingrained in US system

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced a new economic and workforce development transition team that will be headed by, among others, reparations activist Darrick Hamilton, who argues the U.S. economy and governmental policies related to it are racist.  

Hamilton, who went to Oberlin College and later the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the progressive The New School university in New York City. Hamilton's academic biography at The New School calls him a "pioneer" in the field of "stratification economics," which is aimed at looking at how race and ethnicity are embedded into "inequality" in education, economic and health outcomes.

Mamdani announced Monday the creation of more than 17 transition advisory committees made up of more than 400 people to help advise his incoming administration, including the Committee on Economic Development & Workforce Development, which Hamilton will help lead. 

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"Since our nation's inception, the immoral devaluation of Black lives has been ingrained in America's political economy, and (has) manifested in a persistent, unjust, and enormous racial wealth gap," Hamilton told Congress in 2021. "Our unjust racial wealth gap is itself an implicit measure of our racist past that is rooted in a history in which whites have been privileged by (a) government complicit (in) political and economic intervention(s) that have afforded them access to resources and iterative and intergenerational accumulation." 

Hamilton also sits on the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, where he advises members of the New York State legislature on policy recommendations for "reparative justice," as it relates to "the historical and present-day consequences of slavery and discrimination."

One proposal Hamilton is known for is socioeconomic-based "Baby Bonds," which would essentially establish racially conscious trust funds for children. The Baby Bonds would be given a certain amount of seed funding depending upon determined need, and would grow until the kids become adults and can use the money. 

Hamilton has argued that one-time reparations payments do not go far enough and steps, such as the Baby Bonds proposal, should be taken to help Black folks garner ownership of "means of production in American society." Meanwhile, Hamilton has been criticized for allegedly wanting to add Black immigrants to reparations policies, as opposed to making them exclusively for the descendants of slavery.

Yvette Carnell, a prominent activist and co-founder of the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, has also called Hamilton "clueless" and accused the scholar of kowtowing to whichever politician is in power. 

"The racial wealth gap is such that the typical Black family has about 10 cents on the dollar as a typical white family," Hamilton said during a 2020 podcast episode on Freakonomics Radio. "That history of racial disparity, as it relates to wealth-building, certainly didn't end with slavery," Hamilton added. "There was the Homestead Act. There was the G.I. Bill. There was a system of sharecropping. There's a system of Jim Crow. There is a system of redlining. It was government-facilitated."

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During a separate appearance on The Black News Channel, Hamilton also said he is not one to "compromise" on policy either, when asked why Democrats are always "compromising with crazy people."

"I don't like the word compromise … because one thing we know is that when we think about race, the group that is typically the first to be compromised are the issues related to those that are most marginalized, which in the United States' context has been Black people," Hamilton said during the 2021 Black News Chanel interview. 

"We need government to start doing good," Hamilton continued, "because when people realize the government can do good it creates a momentum, a movement forward that makes it harder for us to turn back."

Other folks tapped for Mamdani's new Committee on Economic Development and Workforce Development include Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of the New Economy Project, which she has said on the record is "dedicated to building an economy … rooted in racial and gender justice, neighborhood equity and ecological sustainability."

Not long after Mamdani won his election and began nominating members to his transition team, he faced backlash for staffing his team with aides from former NYC mayoral campaigns, ranging from Bill de Blasio, to Michael Bloomberg to Eric Adams. Mamdani also tapped a longtime Biden adviser to help lead his transition that garnered criticism. 

"The polls have barely closed, and already the incoming mayor is breaking one of his core promises to shake up the status quo and usher in a new day. New York City started a downward spiral under the de Blasio administration, and now some of its main players are returning to the halls of power," Republican strategist Colin Reed told Fox News Digital. "And former FTC Chair Lina Khan became synonymous with her hostility toward businesses large and small during the Biden administration and one of the ringleaders of Bidenomics."      

Neither Mamdani's team, nor Hamilton, responded to Fox News Digital's requests for comments in time for publication.