New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has told the people that they need to embrace the “warmth of collectivism” and reject “frigidity of rugged individualism.” His new tenant's rights advocate Cea Weaver embodies all of that with her claims that homeownership is "white supremacy."
But black homeowners in New York City know that's a lie. Chief among them is former Mayor Eric Adams, who said “Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle. You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind to call that 'white supremacy.' That level of thinking only comes from extreme privilege and total detachment from reality.”
Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver as the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants who said in 2019 “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership [sic] is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
In a virtual meeting, Weaver said the meaning of property must be changed from “an individualized good” to the “collective good,” including “transitioning…toward the model of shared equity…and it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well are going to have a different relationship to property than…the one we currently have.”
Eric Adams, in this case, speaks for many people–not only those who agree with him but also the “immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers” who pursued the American Dream and were able to attain it. His statement points to the fact that America is a country where equality is possible through individual responsibility, no matter what the particular background is of an individual person who is pursuing a better life. What Weaver and Mamdani are proposing is not equality but equity.
"White supremacy? I'm not white," said Renee Gregory who heads Brownstoners of Bedford -Stuyvesant, an organization for black property owners in Brooklyn, founded in 1978. "I read Weaver's comments. I don't know where they come from."
Marlon Rice, a Democrat running to represent the 25th state Senate District in Brooklyn, said "Homeownership is an essential element of black wealth. It’s repugnant to attach yourself to policies that would look to devalue homeownership. We should be fortifying pathways to homeownership."
77-year-old Trinidadian immigrant Ducilla Joseph, who bought her home in the late 1990s, said "It don't make no sense. It's a blessing to own a home." Joseph says all her wealth is in her home.
Homeownership has always been a core component of the quintessential American Dream and that's been true for white, black, and brown Americans. Given her disposition and the outlook, Weaver is nothing more than an activist, trained in academia, fighting for “social justice,” which falls under the concept of equity.
The language Weaver uses is a dead giveaway to her intentions. She may mention the catchphrase of “white supremacy” but her comments about individualized versus collective good are not about race but Marxism. At the core of her and Mamdani's positions is the notion that collectivism is the answer to societal problems. Not only that, but Weaver’s attack is on families, which is another indicator of Marxism. Here, too, we see Adams’ counterargument: property and home ownership is a generational and familial reality.
The word Communism gets thrown around a lot, and it begins to sound quaint, evocative of the Cold War, the Red Scare, and McCarthyism. The Left often mocks the Right for using such an antiquated term. But given the fact that Weaver is proposing a seizure of private property, and what Mamdani clearly supports, there is no other way to describe and define such actions other than Communist.
They can call it socialist-democratic, or any other ridiculously and manipulatively rhapsodic euphemism. Issuing a diktat of how the people need to entirely re-think the notion of property ownership, and concluding that there should be a seizure of private property is not a political or public policy. It is pure and simple an ideology (Marxism) meant to be imposed through political means (Communism).
Will Mamdani actually be successful in this endeavor? Probably not–at least not at the scale that they might be envisioning. But the fact that Mamdani was elected based on this is troubling and shows sheer naïveté and political idiocy on the part of the people who not only have difficulties understanding basic economic principles, but are also often driven by deep anti-Americanism.
