(Editor’s Note: This story has been edited for clarity and length)
If Zohran Mamdani, according to the demographic breakdown of the Democratic party primary, is struggling to win over Black voters in advance of the New York City general elections, it wasn’t immediately obvious on one particular sunny day on Nostrand Avenue, in the heart of largely Caribbean central Brooklyn. As Rep. Yvette Clarke — accompanied by local, state, and city-wide Black elected officials — formally announced her endorsement of Mamdani, passing drivers excitedly honked their horns and pedestrians walked by with approving smiles.
But this was September, less than two months before the general election, and Clarke’s late-hour endorsement reflected an ambivalence that older, mainstream, and moderate Black Democratic Party leaders have shown towards Mamdani’s candidacy since he first entered the race. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries got around to endorsing Mamdani on Oct. 24 — just last week.
An analysis from The New York Times reported that in neighborhoods where more than four out of five people are Black, Mamdani received less than 30 percent of the vote. And in a blow to Mamdani’s claim that he speaks to the interests of economically struggling New Yorkers facing displacement, Mamdani won two-thirds of the vote in the neighborhoods where the Black population decreased the fastest between the 2010 and 2020 censuses.
These data points, however, obscure a more complicated story. For instance, an exit poll by Vera Action showed that more than 70% of Black voters under the age of 50 voted for Mamdani. And Mamdani’s main competitor, Andrew Cuomo, is the beneficiary of Mario Cuomo’s legacy, which has enjoyed the loyalty of Black voters for generations.
In order to make better sense of all of this, I spoke to Zohran Mamdani last week while he was on his way to a mosque in the Bronx to make a major address to condemn Islamophobia.
AmNews: As a Democratic Socialist, do you get frustrated when people focus so much on race instead of class? Do you feel as though there’s a deep enough understanding of how class works in New York City among policymakers and pundits alike?
Zohran Mamdani: I never get frustrated by a discussion of race, and that’s in part because of the phrase I’ve heard often: When America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia.
The affordability crisis that I speak of as a universal crisis across New York City is one that has a disproportionate impact on Black New Yorkers.
I say that as we are living through what has effectively become the reverse Great Migration, where our city has lost 200,000 Black residents in the last few decades alone.
And it is an impact that we are feeling across the five boroughs, and is generationally specific. From 2010 to 2019, this city lost 19% of its population of Black children and teenagers, and to actually tackle this affordability crisis means also tackling the displacement that has been taking place for the last few decades.
AmNews: You’ve been famously walking around the city and talking to thousands of folks. What would you say you’ve learned the most about the lives of Black folks in this city that you didn’t necessarily know before?
Mamdani: I think of a grandmother I spoke to at a senior center in Brownsville. She came up to me and told me that she’d been on the waiting list for eight years for senior housing.
And she told me she could not afford to wait any longer and that if she couldn’t get senior housing in the next few years she was going to leave this city.
And so often when I speak about the agenda that we have, the ambition at the heart of it is to actually match the scale of the crisis in front of us. I hear from other politicians about what we cannot afford. And they often speak about us not being able to afford to raise taxes on their donors. And yet what they lose sight of is that New Yorkers already can’t afford this city and that’s inaccessible.
I went to Mother Zion AME Church in Harlem. The pastor there told me to look out onto the pews. He said, you see how few people are here today for service? He said, it’s not because they don’t love Harlem or they don’t love New York City. They left because they couldn’t afford this city. And a lot of them now live in South Carolina.
And I’ll meet pastors who themselves have been priced out of this city. There was a pastor who opened his doors of his church for a meeting with faith leaders and myself in Brooklyn. And as he walked in, he mentioned just by chance that he had driven two and a half hours to get here from his home.
For all of this discussion of whether billionaires will leave if we increase their personal income taxes by 2%, it loses sight of the fact that working-class New Yorkers are already leaving. The question is not whether or not we’ll have displacement; the question is whether we’re willing to stop it.
AmNews: There are a lot of Black people of a certain age who connect with you through your mother’s (Mira Nair) 1991 film, “Mississippi Masala.”
Mamdani: Great film.
AmNews: I agree. And it tackles some pretty complicated social and economic tensions between Black and Brown people, specifically immigrant Brown people.
So I know you’ve experienced a complicated relationship with Black voters as you’ve been campaigning over the past year, that is not just informed by the fact that you’re of Indian descent, but that you’re also an immigrant and identify as such.
So what do you think is the most challenging barrier and communication between people who identify as Black and African American and those in New York who are one or two generations removed from a life in South Asia, or in your case, Uganda?
Mamdani: I think the history of what so many older Black New Yorkers have had to live through in this city and in this country is one that is critical to understanding whenever I’ve been met with any skepticism or questions as to our agenda.
And I say that because I know that I’m speaking to so many New Yorkers who have lived through so many promises from politicians, lived through much hope of a different life in an improved city, only to have been let down and to have been betrayed time and again.
And in understanding that history, you can begin to understand that skepticism. And I was proud to have won the support of a majority of young Black voters in the primary.
And so a recognition of the fact that we had more work to do with older Black voters and much of that work to me is also the work of introducing myself, because of what I recall when meeting with a pastor. In the primary, we sat down at his church, he endorsed Andrew Cuomo, and I asked him why, and he said, “I endorse Mario’s son.”
And he was referring to Andrew Cuomo’s father, whose name continues to carry a legacy for many New Yorkers, especially among many older Black New Yorkers.
And I did not begrudge the association. I know that my job, however, is to earn support by introducing myself as I am.
I also know that young Black voters have been critical to making that case because I’ve met many older Black voters in the last few months who’ve told me it’s their son, their daughter, their niece, their nephew, their grandchild, who introduced them to this campaign and explained that it is a campaign that seeks to finally deliver on so much of what has been spoken about for so long.
And even though there is such a temptation in our politics to describe everything as if it is the first, as if it exists in isolation, without any precedent, I’ve also appreciated the opportunity to explain how my identity as a Democratic Socialist is also one that is following the example of the first DSA member to have been elected mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, who famously said, in the tradition of democratic socialism, that the accident of birth must never condemn a human being to poverty, sickness or lack of hope, and that it is part of a much longer struggle for dignity than is often understood in this city’s politics.
AmNews: I’m going to ask this again and remove the factor of Cuomo and your candidacy and just talk about the relationship between ordinary people in this city. Again, where do you see the gaps in terms of politics and communication between Black folks and Brown immigrants in this city? Obviously, these are not monoliths of people, but there is undeniably a tension. I’m curious, what kind of insight have you come away with, as you’ve been walking this city?
Mamdani: I think a lot of this comes back to if you’re willing to do the work of actually making the case yourself, as opposed to believing the typical political impulse that you are owed that support.
I am not owed anything by any New Yorker. I have to earn their support. And earning their support means going to them to make the case directly.
And so it has been truly a pleasure to not only continue the church outreach that we did over the course of the primary, but in fact to double it and sometimes triple it, where church is no longer just on Sundays, it’s also on Saturday mornings with Seventh-day Adventists.
You know, when you’re speaking about the importance of tackling social justice, making it clear that without the inclusion of economic justice, it is akin, as has been said, to clapping with one hand.
I visited Cornerstone Baptist Church recently, understanding the deep history of the civil rights movement in this city, such that when I quote Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger,” I’m also quoting a man who in 1958, after having been stabbed, recovered in the parsonage of the very church that I was in.
And I think there is also the recognition that, as a Brown immigrant in this city, there is also an understanding that the struggles of fulfilling a vision of democracy that is true to its ideals is a struggle that existed long before I came to this.
And it’s a struggle that Black New Yorkers have been on the front lines of far longer than I’ve ever thought of the word “democracy.”
AmNews: You’ve been known for your big ideas, and many people have attacked you and these ideas for being unrealistic and unachievable, and for trotting out slogans.
And at the same time, critics relentlessly talk about how dangerous it is that you’re a Democratic Socialist.
So my question sort of falls in between. How far can socialism even go in New York City, which is arguably the capital of capitalism?
Rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare — those things are hard enough, but are you actually looking to disrupt and change the direction of the economic and social order of this city, and in four years no less?
Mamdani: My intent is to deliver on a politics that I have described as Democratic Socialist because it is a politics that believes in the dignity of each and every New Yorker and the responsibility the city government has to deliver that dignity.
And as you said, the deliverance of it is not simply a question of fast and free buses or universal childcare or rent freeze, but it’s a continued fight for that which is necessary for New Yorkers to live a dignified life in the city.
And I’m confident, frankly, because of the fact that there are so many more New Yorkers who are in the struggle for those same things, who may not describe themselves in the same way.
And what I’ve often found in my conversations with New New Yorkers is they don’t tend to ask me how to describe my politics. They ask me if my politics includes them and what I’ve told them is, not only do my politics include them, [but] it’s in fact defined by them and their struggles. It was an older Black woman on the Bx33 who told me a few years ago, “I used to love New York, now it’s just where I live.”
That’s an example of how this city has taken so many people for granted, especially working-class New Yorkers. And that the time is now to deliver on this because, without it, what we are going to see is that these same New Yorkers are going to start to live elsewhere in this same country.
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