Mayor Mamdani’s New York

"Ana minkum wa ileikum,” shouted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, to the heaving crowd in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater just before midnight on Election Night. I’m one of you!

What did he mean by that? Mamdani, after all, can come off as almost comically foreign. Look at the way he waves as he walks to the podium. He doesn’t swing his arm like a regular American. He doesn’t even wiggle his hand, as the late queen did. He frantically flaps his fingertips against his thumbs, the way kindergarteners do when they are pretending to listen to an imaginary friend. There’s something a bit “off” about Mamdani, like those German spies in old movies who, despite their perfect English, give themselves away by not knowing who won the last World Series. Or like Barack Obama, who proclaimed his affection for the Chicago White Sox and then proved unable to name a single player who’d ever taken the field for them. (Mamdani fends off baseball questions, such as whether he’s a Yankees or a Mets fan, by professing himself a fan of English soccer.)

There is a difference between running for president and running for mayor. In a city that is 36% foreign-born, being foreign is a plus. And like Obama growing up in Hawaii, knowing no black people but struggling, as the age demanded, toward a black identity, Mamdani has actively crafted an outsider image. Born in Uganda, the son of the Columbia professor of postcolonial studies Mahmood Mamdani and the Indian film director Mira Nair (she directed the Disney film Queen of Katwe), Mamdani arrived in the United States at age seven from South Africa, where his father had been teaching for years. Before entering politics, he had a brief career as a rap artist under the name “Young Cardamom.”

But radical politics was always his overriding interest. Mamdani is the product of Bronx Science, an elite public high school where admission requires competitive exams, and Bowdoin, which was among the wokest handful of colleges in the country during his time there. He found his mentors in the street-savvy Democratic Socialists of America (where he was close to Bernie Sanders and New York State Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the city’s Muslim Democratic Club (which pursues its own kind of left-wing politics). He rallied a base of immigrants, Muslims, women, and gays. And armed with a gift for invective, he has ridden out against Donald Trump and his policy of tight borders and swift deportations. “Hear me, President Trump, when I say this,” Mamdani shouted toward the end of his victory speech. “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” President Trump, perhaps realizing such a confrontation could do him more harm than good, deferred the prospect for a bit by inviting Mamdani to the White House for an affable conversation on the Friday before Thanksgiving.