Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is driving some people mad.
Mamdani is, of course, the young, charismatic, charming and decidedly left-of-center candidate upsetting the political status quo. He is also Muslim and of Indian and Ugandan descent. The recent political attacks against him are coming from all directions — Republicans, Democrats and the real estate lobby. Some of these attacks are about political interests — of course, landlords wouldn’t like affordable housing and tenant-friendly Mamdani.
But a lot of these attacks are thinly veiled racism. They conflate Mamdani’s left-wing political messaging with the “otherness” of his racial and ethnic heritage. It is an old racial trope that worked unevenly against President Barack Obama. Be afraid of the cheerful brown man. He isn’t a “real” American. He is dangerous because he wants to take from the rich to give to the undeserving poor.
It makes sense that Republicans play this card. They already dally in the irrational world of race fantasy, where white Americans are an oppressed majority. But Democrats are supposed to know better. Being the party that knows that race is real, that it works in measurable ways and that those ways matter to their base is kind of their brand. They had it figured out when these attacks were deployed against Obama.
If they knew it was wrong in Obama’s case, why are they falling for it in Mamdani’s?
For one answer, look to our current political and demographic moment. Americans are more diverse than they were 50 years ago. A combination of migration and changing norms around love and marriage means that the nation has become — and will continue to become — less white.
A primal fear of minorities drove a lot of voters toward Donald Trump. It should be commonly accepted by now that his political rhetoric targets minorities and uses violent stereotypes to dehumanize them and that millions of his supporters don’t just accept that — they relish it.
But at the same time, Donald Trump managed to appeal to some racial minorities during this last election. That caused liberals and poll watchers a lot of angst. How can anyone explain his support among the very racial and ethnic groups that he endangers?
The long and short of it is that multiculturalism is not a natural deterrent to racism.
Dylan Rodriguez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, calls this moment “white Reconstruction,” a term that draws on the 19th-century attempt to enfranchise Black Americans after the Civil War. Rodriguez argues that the long post-civil rights era that flowed from the Civil Rights Act was not one where progress inevitably won out; it was one where the accommodation of social progress looked like racial equality but ultimately undermined it.
Where the Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s attempted to make Black Americans whole, today’s white Reconstruction tries to make white Americans not more whole, but more powerful. On the right, white Reconstruction looks like relentless, shameless attempts to claw back rights from poor people, minorities and women. But on the left, it looks more like what Olufemi O. Taiwo, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, calls elite capture, or the co-option of radical ideas (in this case, diversity) by powerful institutions. Elite capture is a way for those with power to accommodate social progress through the performance of diversity while keeping their hold on political hegemony. It’s action that looks like progress, but in reality it changes very little.
In either case, the tactic is the same. Accommodation allows for cosmetic diversity but it also creates opportunity for white Christian men to claim victimhood in the face of it.
Trumpism’s conservative supporters love this inversion. It protects their economic and political privilege while also granting them the moral authority of victimhood. But as the bipartisan criticisms of Mamdani show, some liberals and Democrats like a little conservative catnip too.
The right excels at puncturing liberal hypocrisy about equality and social progress. Every single time liberals use “woke” as a slur, they empower the right’s attack on multiracial democracy. Wealthy families once talked about anti-white bias in college applications using coded language. Despite having a documented, overwhelming leg up in college admissions, they worried that diversity-obsessed admissions committees would reject their children for being privileged. A lot of those people may despise Trump, but they aren’t exactly upset that ending affirmative action might mean that their kids get the college access they feared would go to an “undeserving” brown kid five years ago.
This is all good context for the incoherent discussion of Mamdani, which frames him simultaneously as a threat and the embodiment of the American dream. He represents the American ideal of diversity — an immigrant who worked hard, studied at Bowdoin College and wanted to be a public servant. But at the same time, there are people on both sides of the political spectrum who want to challenge the institutions, especially the elite colleges, that made his American story possible.
Conservatives may despise higher education’s cultural elitism. Liberals may pretend that they don’t worship it. Both groups channel their anxieties about their own place in our country’s pecking order through it. We know what it looks like from the right. Lots of anti-affirmative action bleating and moral panics about un-American attitudes. What we are seeing in this discussion of Mamdani is what that anxiety looks like from the other side: a lot of hand-wringing about whether the minority student got into college the right way and if he or she internalized the right beliefs about America while there.
Mamdani’s politics are less enamored of our society’s winners than they are with our society’s losers. While Democrats obsess over the middle class, Mamdani’s economic policies prioritize poor and working-class people. He has, in a way, betrayed the white liberal investment in the institutions that made him possible.
That’s why the question of Mamdani’s Columbia University college application hit a sweet spot. Boxes on bureaucratic forms are about resources. The race boxes on college applications represent the state’s interest in knowing which students get what resources. Those data are a critical tool in administering fair, just access to meritocracy’s spoils.
But if you think that college admissions is a zero-sum game where every admission is someone else’s rejection, then the politics of admission becomes personal. Colleges consistently report that race is not a deciding criterion for college admissions, even when they once used race-conscious reviews of applications. But the mere inclusion of the racial boxes on the application activates a primal fear that it could matter. The fixation on Mamdani’s choice to select multiple boxes — one of which was “Black or African American” — reflected the bipartisan belief that race is currency and racial minorities get to spend it at the expense of white people.
The problem is, this view of race is utterly antiquated. Younger Americans view race as an identity, something that can and should represent the complex reality of their lives. The nation is becoming more diverse. That means more such young people are living with that diversity in their families and school lives. Their parents are from two different countries or their siblings are in a different racial category than they are. They try to honor their messy racial lives, despite the restrictions formal boxes present. Checking multiple boxes — or not checking one at all — is an individual accommodation of empirical reality. It is also a threat to the idea of race as something that conservatives can easily vilify or that liberals can easily commodify.
(Mamdani said as much in his statement about how he self-identified on his college application. He checked all the boxes that applied, because no single box, not even the combination of boxes he checked, could effectively capture the completeness of his identity.)
Mamdani’s detractors don’t care about his race; they care about clawing back a century of civil rights and the multicultural liberal democracy that liberalism aspired to build. Conservatives are being honest about that. A lot of liberals are not.
Their panic implies that the education credentials we trust for any other candidate are now suspicious for an ungrateful minority. We cannot trust that minority’s political prescriptions without peering into the core of that person’s racial identity. That’s where we think the “real” them is, in a set of murky loyalties that could turn on America at the drop of a dime. Divining Mamdani’s race is a way to see past his pretty-standard-for-a-politician upbringing and to point to the “something” in Mamdani that makes him untrustworthy.
When both sides of the political spectrum share an obsession with interrogating one’s racial purity, maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who Donald Trump believes that we are.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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