Reparations Activist Appointed to Lead NYC Mayor-elect Mamdani’s Economic Team

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has appointed Darrick Hamilton, a prominent reparations advocate and economist, to co-lead his economic and workforce development transition team. Hamilton, who argues that U.S. economic policies are structurally racist, joins more than 400 individuals spread across 17 transition committees announced by Mamdani on Monday.

Hamilton serves as the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School university in New York City. His academic work focuses on “stratification economics,” examining how race and ethnicity influence inequality in education, economic outcomes, and health across the United States.

“Since our nation’s inception, the immoral devaluation of Black lives has been ingrained in America’s political economy,” Hamilton told Congress in 2021, describing the racial wealth gap as “an implicit measure of our racist past” perpetuated through government policies that have historically favored white Americans.

The appointment represents a significant signal about the incoming administration’s economic priorities. Hamilton currently sits on the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, where he advises state legislators on “reparative justice” related to historical and contemporary consequences of slavery and discrimination.

Hamilton has gained national recognition for his “Baby Bonds” proposal, which would establish socioeconomic-based trust funds for children that grow until adulthood. These funds would provide varying levels of seed money based on economic need, effectively creating a wealth-building mechanism for marginalized communities.

The economist has consistently argued that one-time reparations payments don’t address systemic inequities fully. Instead, he advocates for policies helping Black Americans gain ownership of “means of production in American society.” This approach has drawn criticism from some reparations advocates, including Yvette Carnell, co-founder of the American Descendants of Slavery movement, who has accused Hamilton of being willing to include Black immigrants in reparations policies rather than focusing exclusively on descendants of enslaved Americans.

“The racial wealth gap is such that the typical Black family has about 10 cents on the dollar as a typical white family,” Hamilton noted during a 2020 Freakonomics Radio appearance. He traced this disparity through American history, citing the Homestead Act, G.I. Bill, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and redlining as government-facilitated systems that perpetuated economic inequality.

Hamilton’s appointment comes alongside other progressive economic thinkers on Mamdani’s economic transition team, including Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and Deyanira Del Río, executive director of the New Economy Project, an organization focused on “building an economy rooted in racial and gender justice.”

The mayor-elect’s transition appointments have already sparked controversy. Critics have pointed to Mamdani’s inclusion of staffers from previous mayoral administrations—including those of Bill de Blasio, Michael Bloomberg, and Eric Adams—as contradicting campaign promises to “shake up the status quo.”

“The polls have barely closed, and already the incoming mayor is breaking one of his core promises,” Republican strategist Colin Reed told Fox News Digital, expressing concern about the return of de Blasio-era officials to city government.

Hamilton’s economic philosophy appears to align with his stated reluctance to compromise on policy matters affecting marginalized communities. During a 2021 interview on The Black News Channel, he stated, “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.”

The Mamdani transition team did not respond to requests for comment on Hamilton’s appointment.