Zohran Mamdani could become New York City's first South Asian, Muslim and African-born mayor if elected. He campaigned mainly on housing affordability for lower-income residents while openly embracing his Muslim identity and supporting pro-Palestine activism, which helped unify economically and civically marginalized New Yorkers. His primary victory triggered xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks, including calls for denaturalization, inflammatory imagery, and references to 9/11. Muslim, South Asian and Arab communities experienced intense hate, violence and profiling after 9/11, creating a new racialized category of "Muslim looking" that reshaped public attitudes and enforcement across New York.
(RNS) - If the current polling holds and Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York in November, he will become the first South Asian, the first Muslim and the first African-born mayor of New York City. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who won the Democratic Party primary in June, has primarily campaigned on helping lower-income New Yorkers afford to live in their city.
Once his June victory made him the presumptive winner in the fall, the floodgates of dehumanizing language opened. A Republican congressman from Tennessee dubbed him "little Muhammad," calling for his denaturalization and deportation. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted an image of the Statue of Liberty draped in a black burqa, while South Carolina's Nancy Mace said Mamdani's win showed that New Yorkers had " sadly forgotten " the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
No group of New Yorkers, however, was more profoundly impacted by 9/11 than Muslims. A South Asian American Muslim with deep ties to the community, Mamdani knows the hate, violence and racial profiling that these communities endured in the aftermath of the attacks, which laid bare the conditional nature of the acceptance of Muslims, irrespective of citizenship, class or place of birth.
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