I didn’t become a lawyer because I thought law was salvation. I became one because law is where power hides its hands. Movement lawyering makes that handwriting legible. It creates openings, and it defends communities when institutions retreat from their own promises.
New York City is in one of those moments it likes to call historic. And maybe, just maybe this one is. I think so, but when it comes to racial reckoning and repair, I am an optimist (read: glutton for punishment).
After voters approved ballot measures in November 2022 establishing an equity office, a racial equity commission, and a citywide planning mandate, the city released its preliminary plan in April 2026 and its full plan this September. It spans 45 agencies, 200 goals, 800 strategies, and 600 indicators. Imperfect, but it says inequity is not incidental. It is structured, measurable, and made.
Cities don’t arrive at this language on their own. Organizers, public servants, advocates, and neighbors push them there, insisting that what the government calls disparity is often the afterlife of a decision — a budget, a closure, a zoning action. A policy choice dressed as inevitability. If this moment becomes more than a moment, it belongs to many people.
I want to say something else plainly: I know this terrain because I helped build part of it. Nearly a decade ago I initiated and helped develop part of that earlier architecture. Local Law 174 required equity assessments. Local Law 175 required training on implicit bias and structural inequity. Local Law 177 expanded reporting so disparities by race, gender, and income had to be tracked. Many people made that framework possible. I was one of them.
I believed fiercely in what policy could do then. I still do, though my faith is less innocent now. One of public life’s hardest lessons is the difference between naming a problem and redistributing power—between producing a framework and building a force strong enough to defend it from dilution.
That framework held real possibility, but possibility and protection are not the same thing. The De Blasio administration implemented what could have been embedded across city government far more narrowly, with reporting centered on a few agencies rather than the citywide structure many of us argued toward. I’m not bitter — better informed.
Source: We’ve Been Here Before: New York City’s Racial Equity Commission [Op-Ed]
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