Hi friend — from a jubilant Mamdanistan.
If you’re anything like me, you spent Tuesday night glued to the election night results — and shocked thrilled relieved delighted when we could all be in bed by 10pm.
I couldn’t sleep from the excitement, though — and that arresting photo of Zohran’s family joining him on stage as Dhoom Machale played on C-SPAN (a sentence I still can’t believe I’m actually writing...).
Rana Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist and illustrator, wore a Palestinian-Jordanian denim blouse. The iconic filmmaker Mira Nair is draped in an ilkal sari, handwoven in the Mamdani campaign colors. And Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s foremost postcolonial scholars, stands beside them. Alongside them is Zohran Mamdani, the rapper-turned-mayor-elect upon whom we have pinned a global hope.
The photo in and of itself tells a global story of British colonization and American foreign policy — I’m sure there will be doctoral dissertations written about it.
But I want to to talk about what it teaches us about relational practice and intersectional power.
What struck me on Tuesday — this image, of this family, on this election night — is what it reveals about the practice of living with stories of both privilege and oppression.
We learn our lessons about power in implicit ways — by how oppression has traumatized us, or by how privilege has taught us to dominate.
Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy — these structures give us coercion as the only way forward. They teach a kind of blustering dehumanization that forces a consolidation of power, not stewardship.
Where we are privileged, we can refuse to see the undercurrents. Where we have been oppressed, we can be forced into a role of victim-survivor.
And I’m endlessly curious about what becomes possible when we refuse to flatten ourselves or each other into these singular narratives — but rather, live fully into the complexity of an intersection, as most of us do.
Not just privilege, not just oppression — but both, simultaneously.
Mira Nair is a Punjabi Dehliite who made Mississippi Masala in the early ‘90s — an interracial love story that explores these exact themes. While making that film, she met Mahmood Mamdani, a Mumbai-born Ugandan Gujarati Muslim scholar whose work excavates the architecture of colonialism and power.
Zohran Mamdani grew up with privilege — a wealthy upbringing in Morningside Heights, a liberal arts education, access to social and cultural capital, a loving family.
He also carries the weight of that global colonial history, the lived experience of being an immigrant and Muslim in America, the white supremacy he faced throughout his campaign.
That intersection gave us a polyglot democratic socialist mayor who rose to power because he championed stewardship.
Power with, not power over.
So here’s what I’m wondering about this week:
What stories have you learned from your privilege — from the ways the world has taught you to consolidate or hoard power?
What stories have you learned from your oppression — from the ways you’ve had to fight for belonging or safety?
And what does it look like to interrogate those stories together, to examine them with tenderness and rigor, and to choose how you want to show up with the power you hold?
What version of the world comes to life when you do?
