Mamdani sat down on a few steps and looked up at Kagan, relieved to slip into a comfortable old dynamic. Kagan recounted a parent-teacher conference with Mahmood during Zohran’s first year. “I didn’t know who your father was, I just thought of him as one of those parents who strive,” he said. “He was complaining about your grade.” Mamdani tensed. “He wasn’t grumbling, like, ‘Why don’t you give my son a better grade?’ It was like, “Zohran should be able to do better.” And I said, “It doesn’t matter what the grade is, because the wheels are turning in your son’s head.” And he just floated out of the room.
Mamdani credits Kagan with showing him how to command an audience. He remembers the start of classes one day his senior spring, when the mood was light and attention drifted: “Everyone’s talking, having a good time, and then you just hear the sound of this machete hitting a desk. » Kagan had cut a stalk of sugar cane in two. “And he says, ‘Sugar cane was one of the most valuable crops in the New World,'” Mamdani said. Kagan handed out slices of candy cane for her students to touch and taste.
The world of Bronx Science—a selective public school with some three thousand students, many of them the children of working-class immigrants—differed radically from the affluent intellectual milieu of Mamdani’s childhood. He remembers seeing students of color rehearsing in a jazz combo during his tour of the school. “It was almost a level of parody how racially conscious we were,” Mamdani told me. “There would be, for example, games of Ultimate Frisbee where the two teams were “immigrant nation” and “white nation”. Without any malice. Simply, it was the two teams. In a 2016 episode of the podcast “Encompassed,” an oral history of Bronx Science, Mamdani, 24, joked about a teacher who chased him down the hallway for stealing pass forms. “Keep in mind that this guy graduated from the Israeli army,” he said. “He’s been following the brown guys for a long time.”
In 2008, Mamdani played on the school’s cricket team, made up mainly of other South Asian children. It was the first year that the Department of Education oversaw a cricket league, and most of the other teams were from Queens, where Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other South Asian immigrant communities were growing. “My social circles have changed,” he told me. “By the time I graduated, my closest friends lived in Bath Beach, Glen Oaks.”
For college, Mamdani went to Bowdoin, a bucolic liberal arts school in Brunswick, Maine. (Columbia, where his father taught, rejected him.) Although Bowdoin was whiter and posher than Bronx Science, Mamdani found his calling. Writer Erica Berry, a close friend from college, said: “Walking around the dining hall with him would take longer than with other people, because he would stop at random tables and give each other high fives. » In the chatty columns of the school newspaper, the Bowdoin EastMamdani regularly speaks on current issues. On relations between athletes and non-athletes: “I propose… that we begin a process of integration. » On dance floor etiquette: “Whether it’s grinding your teeth, placing your hands, or leaning in for a kiss, you must obtain consent.” On the “horrible choice of pump music” at the student gym: “How can I expect I can pump five-pound weights with Enya as the soundtrack?” »
Over time, his columns went beyond campus life. “I had arrived in a society where privileges were of a different color,” Mamdani wrote in 2013, about his summer spent studying Arabic in Cairo, while Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the Egyptian army. “Gone was the image of the white Christian man that I had become accustomed to, and in its place was a darker, more familiar image – an image that, for the first time, fit me: brown skin, black hair, and a Muslim name. » The work centered on Mamdani’s decision to grow a beard, which was initially a “symbolic middle finger” to the stereotype of the bearded terrorist in America, but which acquired a different meaning during his time abroad: “Many of my Egyptian friends – first jokingly, then more seriously – told me that I looked Ikhwanias a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mamdani specialized in African studies and wrote his thesis on postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon and Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Berry remembers his lunchroom courtship over Israel and Palestine — an unusual sight at Bowdoin, a fairly apolitical school. Matthew Miles Goodrich, who was a year behind Mamdani and became a founding member of the Sunrise Movement, told me: “We had a professor who liked to say that Bowdoin was a hotbed of socialization. rest.”
As a junior, Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which only a handful of his classmates joined. The following year, he exchanged public statements with Bowdoin President Barry Mills over Mills’ rejection of a call to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Mills called the request an attack on academic freedom. Mamdani and a co-author countered that Mills “ignored how the boycott instead served as a catalyst for greater discussion about Israel’s human rights abuses.”
The occupation of Palestine was a defining moral and political issue for Mamdani. He says his views were shaped by the two years his family spent in South Africa before moving to New York. “Hearing Mandela’s words about the interconnectedness of the struggle for freedom with the struggle for Palestinian human rights, and then coming here and seeing the very different way in which that same conversation was taking place,” Mamdani told me, “there was a glaring exception to so-called universal beliefs when it came to applying them to Palestinians. In an email, Mahmood recalled discussions with his colleagues in Cape Town about “whether particular anti-apartheid strategies – such as the global boycott of apartheid in South Africa – were relevant to the struggle to decolonize or de-ionize Israel.” He added: “Zohran was a listener… I doubt he would have remained indifferent to the exchanges on these issues. »
Two weeks before the primary, Mamdani was invited to appear on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” alongside Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who is third in the polls. Taking advantage of the city’s primary voting system, Mamdani and Lander had recently supported each other as part of an anti-Cuomo strategy pushed by the Working Families Party and other progressive groups. The couple’s appearance would not come with host approval, but it would air the day before the election. Cuomo was counting on strong turnout in wealthy, Colbert-friendly neighborhoods.
A few days before the taping, Colbert’s producers held a preparatory call with the contestants and their assistants. The sample questions covered core political topics, such as the meaning of democratic socialism. Just before the contestants took the stage, the producers appeared in the green room and said they wanted to answer a few more questions. Earlier in the day, a group of prominent Jewish figures, including Elisha Wiesel, Elie Wiesel’s son, sent a letter to Colbert demanding that he question Mamdani about his views on Israel. According to those in the room, one of the producers suggested a “thumbs up or thumbs down” segment: “Thumbs up or thumbs down: Hamas.” Thumbs up or thumbs down: a Palestinian state.”
