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Following a scathing oversight review of the Mayor’s preliminary plan, the ADOS AF NY challenges the Mamdani administration to stop hiding behind vague “People of Color” metrics, track how city agencies treat ADOS New Yorkers, and plan direct remedies for the inequalities revealed.
NEW YORK, NY — If City Hall intends to map a real way forward, it must stop using vague classifications that group entirely different populations together and explicitly isolate the disparities facing the ADOS community. Following the formal release of the New York City Commission on Racial Equity’s (CORE) 65-page review of the city’s preliminary racial equity plan, the New York Chapter of the ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) Advocacy Foundation is issuing a clear warning to City Hall: you cannot deliver targeted, life-altering policy to a population you refuse to explicitly see in the data.
ADOS AF NY provides explicit support for CORE’s denunciation of the Mamdani administration’s Preliminary Racial Equity Plan. The Commission’s report exposes critical omissions across the executive branch’s initial framework, noting that it completely lacked uniform data collection standards, omitted a legally mandated citywide strategy, and failed to integrate community-driven priorities regarding service delivery transparency. Under New York City Charter § 3403(b)(2), City Hall has a clear statutory mandate to track agency outcomes for the ADOS population specifically, creating the necessary empirical baseline to plan and execute targeted remedies for our community
Instead, the administration’s initial report retreated into broad, generalized “Black and Brown” and “People of Color” shorthand – a lazy, panicky administrative masking inherited from past city leadership that collapses entirely different socio-economic profiles and historic trajectories into a single, meaningless bucket.
“Let’s be clear about what happened: City Hall let a room full of cautious lawyers write an equity plan designed to shield the administration from legal scrutiny rather than expose structural reality,” said ADOS AF Chapter Liaison Claudio Simpkins, Esq. “We are aligning with CORE Chair Linda Tigani to hold City Hall’s feet to the fire. The Mamdani administration can disaggregate data by neighborhood, language, and continent to check their bureaucratic boxes, but if they fail to establish a specific tracking mechanism for American Descendants of Slavery, it remains high-tech erasure. It allows City Hall to drape itself in the language of racial justice and equity, while the specific, inherited disparities unique to the ADOS population remain completely unseen, unmeasured, and unaddressed.”
The critical nature of this granular architecture was recently laid bare by civil rights experts at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Center Senior Fellow Eric Morrissette recently noted that data dilution changes the very ground on which economic civil rights stand or fall, occurring at the precise moment courts “are demanding more rigorous evidence of disparate impact to justify policy intervention.”
The message for New York City is plain: when you dilute the data, you disappear the debt. Attempting to use generalized proxies or broad racial categories as a stand-in for targeted lineage metrics is a demographic dead end. Vague socioeconomic or race-based proxies not only fail to accurately isolate the specific community built on a legacy of American chattel slavery and subsequent municipal redlining, but they are also uniquely vulnerable to immediate collapse in federal courts under strict equal protection challenges.
To satisfy the explicit data-first architecture required by the Charter before the 70-day plan revision window closes, ADOS AF NY demands that the administration commit to an explicit data tracking framework for the ADOS population:
An Explicit, Dedicated ADOS Data Field: The City must establish a dedicated, specific tracking option for “American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS)” across all computerized municipal intake infrastructure, digital tracking systems, public-facing dashboards, and agency forms to ensure this specific population is cleanly, permanently, and explicitly accounted for.
By securing this specific data field rather than sliding by on generalized categories like “Black or African American” or relying on an ineffective write-in strategy, City Hall will finally establish the permanent empirical foundation required to accurately measure disparities, protect local wealth from targeted extraction, and deliver precise municipal remedies.
Policy Framework Formally Delivered
ADOS AF NY has formally submitted comprehensive policy recommendations directly to CORE and the New York State Commission on Reparations Remedies, outlining the administrative machinery needed to execute transformational change. Relying on broad categories like “Black or African American” not only hides ADOS outcomes, but it dooms any resulting policy to immediate court collapse as unconstitutional. Our framework does more than just shield future remedies from strict legal challenges – it lays the indispensable groundwork for real ADOS justice.
Our chapter’s comprehensive blueprint includes a proposal for a landmark Lineage-Based Amendment to the Human Rights Law. This recommended legislation would establish lineage as a protected class independent of race, providing a judicially resilient statutory shield to permanently insulate local equity initiatives from federal equal protection challenges.
The Clock is Running
The blueprint for data integrity is on the table, and the Charter’s 70-day revision clock is running. Moving forward, the final citywide equity plan designed by the administration must incorporate an explicit, dedicated data category to measure and reflect the ADOS population, or it will face complete operational non-compliance with the City Charter.
“City Hall needs to realize that the first step is capturing our community in the data, but the next step is actually delivering the policy,” Simpkins concluded. “And let’s be realistic: even once they have us in the data, they cannot accurately target or help the ADOS population specifically unless they rely strictly on a standard of lineage, rather than race or a proxy for race. We have delivered the technical frameworks to the City and State and the administrative baseline is set. If the Mamdani Administration returns in July without a distinct mechanism to track and serve the ADOS population, the final framework is legally deficient and dead on arrival – a total default on its statutory obligations and a betrayal of the city’s equity mission.”
The full text of the ADOS AF NY Technical Blueprint and Recommended Lineage-Based Legislation has been delivered directly to the Commission on Racial Equity and the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies and is attached for public review and journalistic analysis.
