Why black voters won’t come around to Mamdani

When Zohran Mamdani took the pulpit at Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church last Sunday, he had a golden opportunity. He could have spoken to the hopes of black New Yorkers, their resilience, their aspirations for safer neighborhoods, better schools and paths to prosperity. Instead, the first thing he brought up was police shootings.

There is nothing wrong with addressing police shootings. They are tragedies that wound communities deeply. But it is telling that when Democrats step into black churches, their reflex is to start with pain. They do not speak to us as whole citizens with complex desires. They reduce us to our wounds, assuming that the surest way to earn our votes is to rehearse our traumas.
This is what I call “pain politics,” and frankly, I am tired of it.

Black voters deserve more than to be treated as symbols of suffering. We are fathers and mothers, students and workers, homeowners and small business owners. We want what everyone else wants: safety, dignity, prosperity and the ability to hand something down to our children. Yet when Democrats like Mamdani seek our support, they lean on two tired themes: racial grievance and short-term affordability gimmicks.

Take his proposal to freeze rents across New York City. At first glance, it sounds compassionate – protecting tenants from predatory hikes. But we’ve been down this road before. Bill de Blasio tried his version of it, and rents still soared. Landlords gamed the system, units dried up and working-class families were left scrambling for fewer apartments at higher prices. A rent freeze does not build housing. It strangles supply, discourages investment and leaves those at the bottom of the market with even fewer options.

This is where a conservative vision must be bolder. Instead of clinging to policies that punish landlords and stifle growth, we should be championing policies that expand opportunity for renters while encouraging ownership. That means building more mixed-income housing developments that integrate working families into thriving neighborhoods instead of segregating poverty. It means reforming zoning laws that choke off new housing supply and keep rents artificially high. It means offering tax credits for first-time homebuyers and easing the regulatory burden that drives up construction costs.

Most importantly, it means shifting from dependency to ownership. Freezing rent keeps people trapped in cycles where they are always tenants, never owners. Conservatives should be the ones saying to black families: you deserve more than survival, you deserve a stake. Policies that increase access to homeownership, expand voucher portability and encourage private-public partnerships to build affordable units give families a chance to climb, not just tread water.

Contrast this with Mamdani’s broader message. Here is a young man from a privileged background, parachuting into black neighborhoods with lofty talk about “racial uplift” while recycling policies that have already failed. His vision is not one rooted in respect for the agency of black voters but in drafting us into his ideological crusade. He talks to us about pain, then prescribes prescriptions that preserve dependency. It is a pattern as old as the Democratic machine: invoke the wounds of the past, promise relief through government intervention and then move on once the votes are secured.

Black voters are growing weary of this routine. We have noticed that the politicians who show up to our churches rarely ask about entrepreneurship, trade schools, or ways to keep our streets safe. We notice that they have far less to say about the values of family, discipline and education than they do about grievance and redistribution. We notice when our role in their story is reduced to victims in need of rescue, rather than partners in building a stronger future.

The truth is, we are not waiting for politicians to save us. Across the country, black families are starting businesses, homeschooling children, buying homes and investing in cryptocurrency and real estate. We are pursuing ownership and legacy because we know dependency is not liberation.

What offends me about Mamdani’s performance at Bethany Baptist is not only that it was condescending, but that it was unimaginative. To walk into a black church and assume the only relevant message is about police violence is to see us as one-dimensional. To promise rent freezes as if that is the height of affordability policy is to underestimate our capacity and our ambition.

Black voters deserve more. We deserve leaders who speak to our potential, not just our pain. We deserve policies that expand opportunity, not band-aids that entrench dependency. And we deserve to be treated as citizens whose vote must be earned by respect, not assumed through grievance.

For too long, Democrats have relied on pain politics to hold the loyalty of black communities. But pain is not a vision. It is time we demanded more than ritual acknowledgments of tragedy and recycled affordability schemes. It is time we demanded dignity, ownership and a politics that speaks to our future, not just our wounds.