Borough President Torches DSA As White Supremacy

Large crowd at outdoor protest holding signs and banners — Photo: Hadrian / Shutterstock

When a sitting Black borough president brands a socialist faction “white supremacy,” he is not just hurling an insult; he is crystallizing years of tension over who truly speaks for Black and Latino New Yorkers inside a party that now fights its biggest battles with itself.

At a Glance

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards publicly accused the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of embodying “white supremacy,” igniting a very public rift among New York City Democrats.
The feud centers less on abstract ideology than on race, representation, and control of key districts as DSA-backed candidates gain power in historically Black and Latino political strongholds.
Evidence supports the claim that DSA’s membership is overwhelmingly white and that its strongest electoral gains map onto gentrifying, higher-income neighborhoods.
This clash fits a longer New York pattern: insurgent left activists vs. entrenched minority-led machines, each claiming to be the authentic voice of communities of color.

What Donovan Richards Actually Said — And Why It Landed So Hard

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards did not speak in code. On social media, responding to an intra-Democratic dust‑up over a New York Times story about DSA’s relationship with Black and Latino leaders, he posted: “White supremacy comes in all forms.” The target was clear: the overwhelmingly white, left‑wing cadre organized under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, and their growing influence in New York City politics.

Richards’ remark came after Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, a Black DSA-aligned legislator, blasted a Times reporter for allegedly erasing her representation of a working‑class, largely Black neighborhood. A local television host, Errol Louis, pointed out that the article had in fact noted Forrest’s role; Richards then quote‑tweeted Louis with his “white supremacy” line, signaling that the problem was not simply a single article but a broader political culture. In subsequent commentary and coverage, Richards’ posts were paired with a classic Malcolm X warning about white liberals—a lineage of suspicion that casts certain kinds of progressive politics as paternalistic, self‑serving, and ultimately hostile to Black self‑determination.

The Charge: A Lily-White Movement Displacing Minority Power

Richards’ attack did not emerge in a vacuum. For years, Black and Latino elected officials and community leaders in New York have voiced unease about the demographic profile and political behavior of DSA and its allies. The specific claims fall into two related buckets: who is inside DSA, and how DSA operates when it seeks power.

On the membership side, a 2021 internal survey found that roughly 85 percent of DSA members were white. That figure is striking in a majority‑minority city where Black, Latino, and Asian residents together form the clear majority. In reporting and commentary, DSA’s rank and file are frequently described as concentrated among educated white professionals—teachers, academics, and tech workers—rather than among the working poor or the multi‑ethnic service economy. The organization’s leadership insists it is building a multiracial working‑class movement; the numbers suggest that, at least in New York, it has not yet gotten there.

On the behavior side, minority lawmakers describe a pattern: DSA “parachutes” candidates into vulnerable districts, especially those represented by longstanding Black and Latino incumbents, then mobilizes largely white activist networks and new arrivals to oust them. In this account, DSA is not only demographically skewed; it is strategically targeted at dislodging established minority power bases and replacing them with ideologically pure but socially distant representatives. The result is resentment from those who spent decades building influence and relationships in these neighborhoods, now watching newer, whiter political actors claim to speak for their communities.

Where Ideology Meets Race: The Policy Critique

Richards and his allies are not simply arguing that DSA looks too white at meetings. They contend that the organization’s policy agenda reflects the class interests and ideological priorities of its core membership, often at odds with what Black and Latino voters say they want and need. In this frame, “white supremacy” is less about explicit bigotry than about the quiet dominance of one group’s preferences over another’s lived realities.

Critics point to several headline DSA positions: aggressive police defunding, prison closure campaigns, rent freezes, and even legalization of prostitution. Each is defended by DSA as part of a broader project of social justice and decarceration. Yet Black and Hispanic elected officials note that many of their constituents, particularly in high‑crime or economically precarious neighborhoods, are far more ambivalent. A public‑housing resident who worries nightly about safety may not embrace deep cuts to local policing. A small landlord in a Black neighborhood may see rent freezes as an existential threat, not an act of solidarity. And the economics of prostitution, concentrated as they are in specific urban corridors, raise concrete concerns about exploitation and neighborhood stability that abstract slogans can miss.

The National Black Empowerment Action Fund has gone so far as to argue that the DSA agenda is simply “bad for African-Americans,” underscoring that the dispute here is not only rhetorical. From Richards’ vantage point, policies that play well with gentrifying white progressives can feel like collateral damage for the Black and Brown communities that must live with their consequences.

A Familiar New York Story: Insurgents vs. the Black Political Establishment

The fight Richards has stepped into is part of a longer New York saga. Over at least the past decade, left insurgent groups—whether branded as democratic socialists, reform clubs, or activist coalitions—have repeatedly clashed with entrenched Black and Latino political networks over race, representation, and ideological authenticity. These confrontations rarely revolve solely around abstract policy debates. Instead, they are fights over who defines “community voice” and who controls the machinery of nominations, endorsements, and turnout.

In 2019, for example, Black leaders accused predominantly white progressive activists of paternalism—of presuming to know what was best for neighborhoods they did not come from and did not fully understand. In the redistricting debacle of 2022, Democrats accused one another of racism in a bitter internal struggle over maps that could enhance or dilute minority voting power. The common thread is the use of racial legitimacy claims as a tool of intra‑party warfare: activists call the establishment insufficiently progressive or compromised; establishment figures respond by questioning whether newcomers truly represent the communities they seek to govern.

Richards himself has used racial language in earlier local battles, famously blasting a white challenger in his borough president race as a “racist a–” after what he characterized as fear‑mongering campaign tactics. In that sense, his framing of DSA’s encroachment as a form of “white supremacy” is consistent with a broader style of hard‑edged racial critique he brings to political conflict.

DSA’s Counter-Story: Multiracial Electeds, Working-Class Branding

It is important to note that DSA is not an all‑white organization, nor is its slate of elected officials devoid of minority representation. Two of its most prominent figures, Representative Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are Latina and Uganda‑born, respectively. Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest herself is a Black nurse from a working‑class background. Jamaal Bowman, a former “Squad” member, is Black and has been a vocal DSA ally.

These officials argue that DSA stands for working‑class voters across racial lines, challenging entrenched corporate interests and machine politics. Bowman, for instance, complained publicly that his perspective was sidelined in coverage of Black and Latino leaders’ anxiety about DSA, insisting that the organization is rooted in the needs of the working poor. DSA’s national branding likewise positions it as a multiracial, big‑tent vehicle for democratic socialism.

The difficulty, and the source of ongoing friction, is that elite politics is often judged not by who appears on the posters but by the sociology of its core activists and donors, and by the patterns of where it wins. Here DSA’s critics highlight that its strongest electoral footholds tend to be in neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification, with influxes of younger, wealthier, and disproportionately white residents. Those residents are more likely to join DSA chapters, canvass, donate, and vote reliably in low‑turnout primaries. The results look multiracial at the top—nonwhite candidates in office—but feel, to many longtime Black and Latino residents, like power is quietly migrating toward a different set of actors.

The Word “White Supremacy” in a Progressive Civil War

Calling DSA “white supremacy” is a deliberately provocative move. Traditionally, white supremacy refers to ideologies and systems built on explicit belief in white superiority and the subordination of nonwhite people. Richards is using the term more elastically, to describe a political formation in which white, often higher‑income progressives dominate agenda‑setting, organizational culture, and the displacement of minority-led institutions—even while speaking the language of racial justice.

Whether one finds that characterization persuasive depends on how one weighs demographic data, policy impacts, and political practice. The 85 percent white membership figure is not in dispute. Nor is the reality that DSA has successfully challenged older Black and Latino incumbents, often in districts that have recently become whiter and more affluent. At the same time, DSA can point to its own diverse officeholders and to policies—such as expanded tenant protections or higher minimum wages—that materially benefit many Black and Brown residents.

What the evidence supports with some confidence is that this feud is not mainly about whether socialism is good or bad in the abstract. It is about governance in a changing city: who sits at the table, whose priorities get encoded into law, and how a movement that styles itself as anti‑racist reconciles a membership and tactical footprint that repeatedly collide with the interests and authority of Black political elites.

Why This Fight Will Outlast the News Cycle

New York is not unique in experiencing a clash between older minority-led machines and newer, mostly white progressive activists. But its density of power, diversity, and media makes it an especially vivid stage. As long as DSA and similar formations continue to grow—membership nationally has surged over the past decade, with tens of thousands of members claiming affiliation and recent reports touting record levels—the question Richards has forced into the open will remain: can a predominantly white socialist movement legitimately claim to be the vanguard of racial justice while repeatedly undermining minority-led establishments?

For readers watching from outside New York, the immediate personalities—Richards, Mamdani, Forrest, Bowman—are less important than the architecture of the conflict. When you hear “white supremacy comes in all forms” from within a Democratic feud, you are listening to a deeper argument about the limits of allyship, the politics of gentrification, and the uneasy marriage of race and class in twenty‑first‑century progressivism. The rift is not a sideshow; it is central to how America’s urban left will govern itself, and whom it will ultimately serve.

Black NYC Democrat accuses DSA of ‘white supremacy’ as Democratic feud explodes
=> Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. (D) leveled accusations of white supremacy at DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS of AMERICA.https://t.co/n1qnCcHPBC

— Chet (@ChetRusinek) July 21, 2026

How Voters Should Read the Battle Lines

For Black and Latino New Yorkers, this is not an academic debate. It is a dispute that will shape policing levels, housing policy, school funding, and the texture of everyday life. When a DSA slate runs against a long‑time Black incumbent, the choice on the ballot is not only between “socialist” and “moderate,” but between different theories of representation: one rooted in long tenure and local networks, the other in ideological consistency and activist energy.

Richards’ language is sharp, arguably inflammatory. But beneath it is a question worth considering with equal bluntness: when a movement’s membership, leadership, and power bases are overwhelmingly white, its rhetoric of racial justice needs to pass a tougher test. In New York, that test is being administered not by conservatives, but by Black Democrats who believe that what is being sold as liberation risks becoming a new kind of dispossession.