Queens Borough President Donovan Richards publicly compared Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Democratic Socialists of America allies to white supremacists, a sharp escalation of a simmering feud over whether the party's far-left wing sidelines Black and Latino Democrats.
Richards, a liberal Democrat who has represented Queens for more than thirteen years, posted on social media late Sunday with a blunt message: "White supremacy comes in all forms." In a second post, he shared a Malcolm X quote aimed squarely at white progressives, as the New York Post reported.
The posts landed hours after a New York Times report published July 19 highlighted how the DSA focuses on its own agenda while largely ignoring Black and Latino members and the issues that matter to them across New York City's five boroughs. That report set off an online debate, and Richards drove straight into it.
His Malcolm X quote left little room for interpretation:
"The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the 'smiling' fox."
The exchange is not an isolated spat. It sits at the center of a widening rift inside the New York City Democratic Party between an overwhelmingly white socialist faction and the minority elected officials who say they are being shoved aside in their own districts.
A 2021 survey found that 85 percent of DSA members are white. That statistic has become a recurring flashpoint as the organization expands its footprint in neighborhoods where Black and Latino residents have lived, and voted, for decades.
Ryan Adams, managing director at the political consulting firm Actum, pointed to the pattern. DSA candidates previously lost races in predominantly minority neighborhoods before Mamdani became their standard-bearer. Now, Adams said, the group's growth tracks gentrification more than grassroots organizing.
"While they are electing diverse candidates, the growth of DSA is coming in places that are seeing the most gentrification."
Adams added that the disconnect runs deeper than geography:
"Socialism has a long history with communities of color, but it's hard to argue the recent activity has been deeply intertwined with the communities."
The DSA has backed candidates from minority backgrounds, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani himself among them. But critics contend the organization parachutes its own preferred candidates into vulnerable districts over seasoned Black and Latino contenders with proven records, then wins by running up margins among upper-income, young, white voters.
That is exactly what happened in the June Democratic primaries. Mamdani endorsed two DSA congressional candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, over incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Both DSA-backed candidates won, largely carrying areas flush with wealthier, younger, white residents. The socialist primary sweep deepened a divide that had been building for years.
Richards endorsed Mamdani after the Uganda-born politician secured the Democratic nomination for mayor. But the alliance frayed fast once Mamdani took office and began governing from the DSA playbook.
Weeks into his tenure, Mamdani's administration proposed a 9.5 percent property tax increase, calling it the only way New York City could survive. Richards pushed back publicly, telling the Post that Mamdani's "New Era shouldn't price out black and brown New Yorkers." For a borough president who represents one of the largest blocs of Black homeowners in Queens, the tax hike was not an abstraction, it was a direct threat to his constituents' ability to stay in their homes.
Earlier this year, during a brutal and deadly cold snap, Richards called on the Mamdani administration to force people off the streets and dismantle homeless encampments. His message was plain:
"You can't let the people stay out there. These are people in crisis."
On both issues, taxes and public safety, Richards found himself arguing against an administration he had helped elect. The pattern is familiar to Democrats who have publicly broken with their party's socialist wing after watching its policies collide with the needs of working-class and minority communities.
The ideological gap between the DSA's leadership class and the minority communities it claims to champion showed up most starkly in a debate over homeownership, a cornerstone of wealth-building for Black families.
Cea Weaver, one of Mamdani's top advisers, previously described homeownership as "a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as 'wealth building' public policy." The remark drew a sharp response from Renee Gregory, president of the Brownstoners of Bedford-Stuyvesant Inc., a group founded in 1978 to help keep Black homeowners in the historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood.
Gregory's reply, in an interview with the Post, was two sentences long and did not require elaboration:
"White supremacy? I'm not white."
That exchange captured the fundamental tension: a white adviser in the mayor's orbit labeling Black homeownership as white supremacy, while a Black community leader who has spent decades protecting that homeownership stared back in disbelief. The National Black Empowerment Action Fund has contended that the DSA's agenda is bad for African-Americans, and moments like this explain why.
After the New York Times report dropped, DSA state Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest criticized the Times reporter and argued the story omitted a fact about a Black DSA member representing one of the neighborhoods mentioned. Another journalist then pointed out that the Times article had already addressed Souffrant Forrest's complaint, suggesting she had not read the full piece before responding.
Richards jumped in after that exchange, posting his "white supremacy" message and the Malcolm X quote. The sequence matters: a DSA lawmaker's reflexive dismissal of reporting on race within the organization was the immediate trigger for a prominent Black Democrat to go public with the comparison.
The broader conflict extends well beyond Richards and Souffrant Forrest. Mamdani has used his office to drag the Democratic Party farther left, endorsing DSA candidates over minority incumbents and pushing a policy agenda that prioritizes socialist economics over the bread-and-butter concerns of Black and Latino New Yorkers. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has faced pointed questions about whether the establishment can hold its ground, and so far the answers have been evasive.
Richards, elected borough president in 2020 after an eight-year stint on the City Council, is not a conservative critic lobbing charges from outside the tent. He is a thirteen-year Democratic officeholder who backed Mamdani for mayor and now watches the DSA machine displace the very communities he represents. His willingness to invoke white supremacy, against members of his own party's coalition, signals that the frustration among minority Democrats has moved past private grumbling.
Neither Mamdani nor the DSA has publicly responded to Richards' comparison. That silence may not hold. The Mamdani administration already faces criticism on multiple fronts, from tax policy to public safety to its posture on federal law, and an open accusation of racial indifference from a fellow Democrat adds another crack to an already strained foundation.
When a Black elected official with more than a decade of service compares his own party's activist wing to white supremacists, and backs it up with Malcolm X, the Democratic coalition is not experiencing a policy disagreement. It is experiencing a legitimacy crisis. And the people paying the price are not the ideologues in the DSA's overwhelmingly white membership rolls. They are the Black and Latino voters whose neighborhoods keep getting organized on their behalf by people who do not look like them, do not live like them, and do not listen to them.
