Tuesday, October 14, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Trump administration officials seriously discussing invoking Insurrection Act, sources say--THE CRIMINAL MADNESS CONTINUES--FIGHT BACK!

"WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE..." 

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) 
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
1817-1895

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” 
--Frederick Douglass, August 3, 1857
 
Trump administration officials seriously discussing invoking Insurrection Act, sources say

A decision isn't expected to be imminent, one source said, but debate within the administration has shifted recently to more deeply exploring how and when the act might be invoked.


President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on Monday.Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images


by Courtney Kube, Katherine Doyle, Carol E. Lee and Garrett Haake
October 8, 2025
NBC News

WASHINGTON — White House officials have held increasingly serious discussions in recent days about President Donald Trump’s invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 19th century law that gives the president the power to deploy active-duty troops inside the United States for law enforcement purposes, five people with knowledge of the talks told NBC News.

Trump has sought to deploy National Guard troops in several major cities — including Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon — saying they are needed to reduce crime and protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from protesters. Critics have said the Trump administration is exaggerating issues in those cities.

A decision to invoke the act is not expected to be imminent, a senior administration official said. Were it to happen, it would be a notable escalation. The guard is currently deployed in limited support roles since active-duty members of the military are forbidden from conducting civilian law enforcement actions, such as conducting searches and making arrests. But the Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy troops inside the United States for that purpose.

Trump’s plans to deploy the National Guard have occasionally hit legal hurdles. A federal judge in Oregon on Sunday blocked him from sending guard members from any state to Portland. The next day, Trump said publicly that he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.”

“If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. As of now, he said, it has not been needed.

Talk inside the White House about invoking the act has ebbed and flowed since Trump took office again in January, said the five people, who include the senior administration official, two people familiar with the discussions and two people close to the White House.

But the debate inside the administration has shifted recently, from whether it makes sense to invoke the act to more deeply exploring how and when it might be invoked, both people close to the White House said.

Administration officials have drafted legal defenses and various options for invoking the act, two of the people said.

But the current, broad consensus among Trump’s aides has been to exhaust all other options before taking that step, the senior administration official and one of the people close to the White House said.

The person close to the White House described the process as working its way up “an escalatory ladder.”

Asked about discussions regarding invoking the Insurrection Act, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “The Trump administration is committed to restoring law and order in American cities that are plagued by violence due to Democrat mismanagement. And President Trump will not stand by while violent rioters attack federal law enforcement officers. The administration will work to protect federal assets and officers while making American cities safe again.”

The act gives the president broad discretion regarding its invocation. It can be invoked at the request of a state or when the president determines that conditions like “unlawful obstructions,” “rebellion” or “insurrection” have made it difficult to enforce the law. During the Civil Rights era, three presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — used the act to protect activists or enforce court orders mandating desegregation. It was last used, at the request of California’s governor, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

The governors of Oregon and Illinois both oppose sending troops to their states. There are no riots, and authorities there are not defying court orders.

The White House expects that any potential invocation of the act would be met with swift legal challenges and ultimately land at the Supreme Court.


Last month, a federal judge ruled that the White House’s deployment of active-duty troops to Los Angeles in June was illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that prevents the military from being used as police. After that decision, administration officials revived discussions and internal legal analyses around invoking the Insurrection Act, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions and one person close to the White House.

But Trump was cautioned that doing so under current circumstances might not hold up in the Supreme Court, which would break his series of victories there, these people said, and the idea was tabled for a time.

A White House official declined to discuss specific deliberations but said Trump’s legal team is focused on charting a legal pathway that can withstand judicial scrutiny.

“Ultimately it’s the president’s vision and the president’s policies that he got elected to implement that the attorneys are just working hard to defend,” the White House official said. “We’re working hard to look at the law and say, ‘How do we achieve the president’s vision?’”

Trump considered invoking the act in his first term during the protests after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020. He declined despite the urging of some allies and later regretted that decision, according to the senior administration official. He is viewing his current decision through that lens, the senior administration official said.

One of Trump’s deputy chiefs of staff, Stephen Miller, has been a leading and longtime proponent of invoking the Insurrection Act. Miller has been at the center of discussions about the issue since Trump took office, said the five sources and another person familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have discussed invoking the act if local law enforcement authorities cannot or will not protect ICE and federal law enforcement agents, one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But one concern that some officials have raised is that invoking the act could eventually lead to pitting active-duty U.S. troops against other Americans, this person said.

Trump has stepped up his use of the word “insurrection” to describe developments in Portland and Chicago in recent days. On Monday he said the pushback against ICE agents’ attempts to carry out immigration enforcement operations in both cities is “criminal insurrection.”

Trump and Miller have described the protesters against ICE operations in Chicago and Portland as participating in organized violence against the federal government.

“They’re saying they’re going to carry out insurrection against the federal government by using force, obstructive force, to keep ICE officers from going out and conducting arrests,” Miller told reporters Monday. “This is an all-out campaign of insurrection against the sovereignty of the United States because the Democrat Party and those who are committing violence in this country do not believe in legitimacy of the sovereign territory of the United States.”


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:


Courtney Kube

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.


Katherine Doyle

Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.


Carol E. Lee

Carol E. Lee is the Washington managing editor.


Garrett Haake

Garrett Haake is NBC News' senior White House correspondent.

Julia Ainsley, Tara Prindiville, Jonathan Allen, Gordon Lubold and Sydney Carruth contributed.






FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Major Public Intellectual, Author, Legal Scholar, Attorney, Social Critic, Historian, Editor, and Activist Brando Simeo Starkey On The Real Dialectical, Theoretical, and Practical Links Between the Political Economy Of Racial Capitalism and the Doctrine and Practice Of White Supremacy in the United States And the Inextricable Role It Plays In the Actual Lives and Thus Social, Economic and Cultural Status and Political Reality of White Americans of Every Class Group in the Nation, and Finally How and Why It Has Been and Remains A Foundational Historical, Structural, Institutional, and Systemic Force In The Contemporary Rise and Expansion of Fascism in the U.S. Today

 
How Trump and White Supremacy Are Killing American Democracy—And Why White Americans Are Helping It Happen
 
The Role of Caste Preservationism, Oligarchs, and Racial Division in Undermining Democracy—And What Must Be Done to Stop It

by Brando Simeo Starkey
March 10, 2025
Braveverse


Trump’s America is proving that white supremacy isn’t just oppressive—it’s self-destructive. Here’s how racial caste politics empowers billionaires, weakens democracy, and hurts the very people who uphold it.


The Role of Caste Preservationism in Trump’s Policies

White supremacy bedevils American democracy, like a congenital disease set to finally exterminate its host unless White Americans can prize country above race.

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement endeavored to further entrench Whiteness as the hegemonic, organizing force in electoral politics. The machinations succeeded, and Trump recaptured the White House, defeating sitting Vice President Kamala Harris.

Like before, Trump ran as what I call in my upcoming book, Their Accomplices Wore Robes, a caste preservationist—a person who, in the race context, sets as an objective the eternal primacy of the White population. His campaign operated from the understanding that he would strengthen the country’s White-on-top racial caste system. He quickly translated into policy the right-wing’s ambition of advancing caste preservationism, the quintessentially American project of maintaining a racial hierarchy in a nation that professes to extend freedom and liberty to all.

During his first days at the helm, Trump signed executive orders that targeted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and revoked a 1965 executive order issued by President Lyndon Johnson that required non-discrimination from federal contractors. These presidential actions expand the unfair advantages awarded to White people.

Another executive order attempts to terminate birthright citizenship. This wildly unconstitutional ploy, aimed particularly at recent immigrants of color, reminds them that many real Americans consider them forever unworthy of citizenship rights regardless of birthplace. By torpedoing DEI programs, dismantling non-discrimination protections, and attacking birthright citizenship, Trump’s administration not only reinforces racial hierarchy but also undermines the foundational democratic ideal of legal equality.

Trump heads a movement that rejects efforts to welcome long subjugated racial groups—the lower castes—into the national family. The administration warns Black and Brown communities especially to no longer expect equal protection of the laws and informs like-minded caste preservationists that the federal government will refrain from intervening on behalf of their victims. Only those born with Whiteness, in Trump’s America, can ever be true members of We the People who deserve governmental representation.

Two truths concerning White supremacy, in just a short time into Trump’s presidency, have grown impossible to ignore. First, that it fuels destructive voting patterns that empower oligarchs and erode democracy. Second, that it drives support for policies that sabotage the American economy and democracy, even in areas seemingly unrelated to race.

The American people must appreciate and act on these truths by forging a sustainable, majority multiracial coalition if they desire to emerge with any chance, after Trump, at reconstructing political systems and institutions.
 
How White Supremacy Fuels Destructive Voting Patterns

Even before the Civil War, many among the White masses, faithful to White supremacy, had already devolved into what the country’s founders dreaded: voters easily manipulated by the ultra-wealthy and thus turning into patsies who defeat the central conceit of democracy. And that enduring mindset empowers oligarchs who are destroying the nation. Destroying its institutions. Its way of life. Men like Elon Musk are crushing into rubble what could take generations to clean up and repair.

During the colonial era and the early years after the Revolutionary War, the fear that non-landowning White men would act as the easily manipulated dupes of their “masters,” or what we now would call bosses, convinced colonies and then states to restrict voting rights to landowners, with the holding of acreage equating to financial independence.

Many early leaders envisioned America as a new land that would best old England. The hereditary elite ruled England, catering to nobility and the landed gentry, while neglecting the needs of the masses. Although in America, the small farmer with land commanded a high level of regard, early generations doubted that the “servant” class, viewed as dependent, could ward off the pressure of their economic betters. Under the doomsday scenario, America would deteriorate into England. Become a place where elites ruled, albeit through proxies who pulled the lever against their own interests.

Many White people now vote for what they consider as good for White people. Yet, they mistake the interests of the rich as “White interests.” Thus, the rich control our democracy. In an ideal world, individuals vote to secure their own financial, medical, and bodily safety. They vote for their own wellbeing, and that of their fellow citizens. They behave, in other words, rationally. This steers the country in a direction most beneficial to popular majorities. Instead, millions vote against “the others,” against out-group members, against Black and Brown people, turning potential allies into persecuted enemies. This allows capital to prosper from division amongst labor.

The White working class, like many balloters, visited the polls in 2024 griping about inflation. About the price of goods, services, and living expenses. Trump discussed those concerns, offering no real solutions. True—he offered tariffs. But tariffs increase prices. He forged tremendous headway blaming the others though. He blamed, for example, rising housing costs on undocumented persons. Through such remarks, along with the political right’s prolific manipulation of bigotry, like hurling “DEI” as a racial slur, caste preservationists prompted White voters to consider their vote along racial lines.

Nonetheless, soon after regaining the White House keys, Trump swung the door open to oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk. Through the newly created Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk is the face of the administration’s evisceration of the federal government. Musk handed nearly $300 million dollars to elect Trump, and Trump repaid his debt, allowing Musk, putatively, to cut wasteful government spending. In actuality, though, Musk is corrupting government. Worsening the lives of everyday Americans. But enriching himself.

Musk has fired thousands of federal employees, including 6,000 veterans. He has demeaned countless others, asking them to justify their continued employment and feeding their written responses to an artificial intelligence system to evaluate the necessity of their positions. Fired employees have received letters impugning their work, even when their performance reviews were stellar.

He has slashed cancer and Alzheimer’s research. Because of layoffs, federal parks are closing to the public. Even social security payments seem infirm given that Musk called the program a “Ponzi scheme,” and sources inform that thousands, maybe even half the Social Security Administration 60,000 person workforce faces layoffs.

Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX businesses, however, have received $18 billion in federal funding since 2015. Eight million dollars a day. The world’s richest man engorging on billions in taxpayer dollars. Not wasteful though. That spigot keeps running. Meanwhile, Musk is furthering his own business interests by firing regulators investigating his companies as business leaders pay Trump as much as $5 million to dine with him.

White supremacy has prevented many from understanding that they routinely sacrifice their own health, comfort, and prosperity and that of their fellow citizens to advantage billionaires. They have become the very dupes a fledgling nation, desperate to evade the pitfalls that inspired many to cross the seas and bear muskets for independence, deemed unworthy of the ballot.
 
The Economic and Social Costs of Racial Hierarchy

White supremacy, furthermore, engenders support for ideas and policies that debilitate society even in areas having little connection to race. The taint of White supremacy, simply put, bleeds everywhere.

This observation builds on what sociologist Joe Feagin terms the “White racial frame” which describes how White people see and understand the world and everyday occurrences. White people, Feagin observes, generally view America through a lens. American culture has indoctrinated them into assuming they represent the intellectual and cultural vanguard. Trained them into viewing their dominant status—their privilege—as proper. Taught them to conclude that racial inequalities cannot be traced back to their race’s past or present transgressions. Those who most perceive the world through the White racial frame interpret events to defend the status quo and a White-on-top racial hierarchy.

Operating out of the White racial frame buys trust with much of White America. This trust grows not from expertise, not from logic, but from cultural and racial solidarity.

The politicians, political commentators, anyone really, who most strongly operate out of this frame receive instant and often unshakeable credibility, giving legitimacy to viewpoints even on subjects unconnected to race. The sort of folk who, for example, criticize movements for racial justice in policing also, for instance, often call climate change a hoax, or attack the safety of vaccines. The credibility the speaker earns through the embrace of White supremacy helps sway listeners into accepting the speaker’s other positions. White supremacy, therefore, colors all policy conversations.

Trump voters, who expressed dissatisfaction with the economy and the price of goods, supported a candidate promising to introduce tariffs, which would further raise prices. His alignment with White supremacy signaled general trustworthiness, signaled that he too played for their team. But now, his economic policies are producing predictable effects, higher prices, increased unemployment, more financial insecurity, inflicting real damage that injures the economy.

Similarly, prominent caste preservationists like President Trump or Tucker Carlson have lauded tyrants like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Viktor Orbán. This, in turn, has swayed millions of their followers to align with fascists.

America now condones a commander-in-chief opening his arms to strongmen but stiff-arming a democratically elected leader like Ukraine’s Volodymyr and inciting trade wars with Mexico and Canada. By praising authoritarian leaders, Trump signals a rejection of democratic values and an embrace of fascism, crippling America’s standing, however undeserved, as a global champion of freedom and human rights. Now trusted allies won’t even share intelligence with America.

We will forever be the country that elected a man who embraced tyrannical leaders, undermining our future safety in a myriad of unpredictable ways.
 
Building a Multiracial Coalition for Democracy

America’s redemption requires a great abandonment of White supremacy.

Instances of White people choosing interracial coalitions over White solidarity fills America’s present and history. Black and White southerners joined together in 1870s and 1880s Virginia under the Readjuster Partybanner. Then again, they did in 1890s North Carolina through center-left fusion politics. In both states, they ousted avowedly White supremacist, conservative state governments, during an era far more racist than now.

Whiteness can be organized around something other than White supremacy as Linda Martín Alcoff, philosophy professor at Hunter College, maintains in her book The Future of Whiteness. She rejects “white exceptionalism,” or “the idea that whiteness is so distinct as a form of social identity and so problematically tied to its supremacist illusions that it cannot be redeemed.” We mustn’t idle as impending doom draws close. Fatalism can produce no victories. And it errs on analytical, historical, and moral grounds.

What would trigger a reimagining of Whiteness today, however, proves difficult, yet what potential strategies deserve a chance presents an easier question. White voters who have enlisted with Trump liked what they heard, at least more than what they heard from his opponents. The Democratic Party, then, should rework how it addresses White voters, particularly the much-discussed White working-class. The Republican Party, the political headquarters of caste preservationism, wielding both dog whistles and direct appeals to communicate with White voters about race, depicting issues within a dishonest us-versus-them narrative. The time has arrived, perhaps, for Democrats to also talk about race with these voters. But Democrats should tell them the truth in hopes that they finally direct their ire at those truly deserving blame. The billionaires. The oligarchs.

In his farewell speech, former president Barack Obama attempted something approaching this. “[W]e’re not where we need to be,” he said referring to matters of race. “And all of us have more work to do. If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves. If we’re unwilling to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we will diminish the prospects of our own children.”

America needs an interracial majority coalition. And the Trump opposition might be able to help build this by instructing White Americans, explicitly, about the price White supremacy extracts from them and everyone else. That teaches them how they and the nation can flourish by pursuing a democracy that advantages everyone, one that jettisons its racial caste system.

Storytelling provides the best way to teach, the best way to change a mind. Trump has been telling White people a story that they are believing, even though it ends with the rich and powerful as the actual winners. Ends with them as the losers. Ends in economic ruin. Ends with a tattered democracy.

White supremacy has turned millions into foot soldiers for billionaires. Someone seeking the presidency should tell White people this story. Time has come to tell them the truth.


If you found this essay insightful, subscribe to my newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, forward it to a friend. Thanks!

The Braveverse
 
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY is a writer and scholar. He is the author an important new book 
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025)
. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the New York Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and wrote for several years for ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape). Born and raised in Cincinnati, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons. He launched a newsletter, The Braveverse, about law, politics, and freedom from caste, at the TheBraveverse.com in January 2025
  

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Great Sherrilyn Ifill, Extraordinary Legal scholar, Legendary Attorney, Groundbreaking and Pioneering Teacher and Activist, Formidable Public Intellectual, and Inspiring Leader Gives A Typically Brilliant And Compelling Speech at the 'Mecca Of African American Higher Education', Howard University in the Name Of Our Always Glorious Collective Struggle For True Liberation and Self Determination In All Aspects of Our Lives In A Direct National Response To A Raging Fascist Movement (and Federal Government) in the U.S. Today

Sherrilyn Ifill Delivers Keynote Address at Howard University's 2025 Opening Convocation Ceremony—VIDEO +
 
 
 
September 29, 2025

VIDEO: 
 

Howard University leaders opened the academic year September 19 with its 158th Opening Convocation ceremony that acknowledged the weight of changing times. Convocation keynote speaker Sherrilyn Ifill, a Howard School of Law professor, cited the “heaviness in the land” but urged students to see the moment as time for democratic renewal. You can watch Ifill's full remarks.

Monday, October 13, 2025

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Doubleday, 2025



[Publication date: June 3, 2025]

A magisterial new history of the role of the Supreme Court as an ally in implementing and preserving a racial caste system in America

Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court—even more than the presidency or Congress—aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

The Reconstruction Amendments—which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights—converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation’s founding conceit—that all men are created equal—real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness.

Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters—petitioners, attorneys, justices—to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today’s federal courts lurch rightward. In this groundbreaking grand history, Brando Simeo Starkey reveals a troubling and dark aspect of American history.


REVIEWS:


"A searing indictment of judicially condoned—and even enshrined—racism in American law. . . . A powerfully argued study of a legal system that favors those who 'persevere in undermining Black freedom.'"—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


"Vividly narrated and astute, this is a damning reassessment of the judicial branch’s civil rights legacy." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)


"Precisely outlines, within the historical context of the United States, how the Supreme Court has repeatedly and specifically denied or significantly delayed full rights of citizenship to Black people. . . . Starkey masterfully uses a unique blend of storytelling and legal documentation to share his declarations." —Library Journal (starred review)


"Brando Simeo Starkey delivers a devastating cross-examination of the Supreme Court of the United States. . . . Starkey demolishes the myth of color-blind jurisprudence and lays bare SCOTUS’s central role in preserving caste-based inequalities in American life." —Alta Journal

“Their Accomplices Wore Robes is a stark, measured indictment of power dressed in principle. Brando Simeo Starkey lays bare the quiet, deliberate mechanisms by which the Supreme Court has upheld a racial caste system—not as an aberration but as a feature of its design. This is not a book about what we wish to believe about justice; it is a book about what justice, in practice, has too often been. Starkey writes with clarity and precision, refusing easy conclusions or consolations. The result is an indictment of a judicial system that must be fundamentally reformed or abolished if we're to have real democracy.” —Donovan X. Ramsey, author of When Crack Was King, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the National Book Award


“Starkey’s book is a passionate, deeply researched, humanistic story of how African Americans have evoked the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments as a bulwark against a racial caste system from the Jim Crow era to the present, and how their efforts have often been met with faulty reasoning, disavowals of reality, and obfuscation by a Supreme Court that has repeatedly shut its doors to their claims. Elegantly composed in a personal style that makes its stories come alive, this book is a book written to inspire reflection, disagreement, and argument – the kinds of things that are sorely needed in our own complex times.” —Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Harvard University



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY is a writer and scholar. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the New York Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and wrote for several years for ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape). Born and raised in Cincinnati, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons. He launched a newsletter, The Braveverse, about law, politics, and freedom from caste, at the TheBraveverse.com in January 2025

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Leg: The Trinity Conception

West Virginia’s second capitol, in downtown Charleston, an Italianate building with Romanesque flourishes, provided coal country architecture fit for Milan. Within its three stories, in February 1873, the Democrat-dominated legislature debated a bill that would help sculpt a post-slavery racial caste system.

Separating from Virginia, a split nearly a century in the making, West Virginia became the thirty-fifth state in June 1863, remaining loyal to the Union. The Republican Party had controlled West Virginia politics since its genesis. Ahead of the 1870 elections, a contingent of West Virginia Democrats asked Delaware Democratic senator Willard Saulsbury how the party could attract Black voters, less than 5 percent of the state’s voting population. Saulsbury cautioned that the time remaining until the election seemed “too short to pull the wool over their eyes.” He advocated they scream “White man’s party” instead because enough “ignorant white men” populated the state “who would [normally] vote the Republican ticket that we can get to vote ours.” It worked, and in January 1872, West Virginia held a convention to write a new constitution. Inside a small, run-down Charleston church, seventy-eight delegates, sixty-six of them Democrats, huddled. The most conservative Democrats favored a constitution that restricted Black rights. One Democratic delegate, George Orrick Davenport, a volunteer Union soldier, joined his party’s larger contingent, moderates who opposed a constitution that undergirded a racial caste system.


A year later, that strain of anti-Black animus endured and inspired discussion about a White-male-only jury law. The bill appeared destined for history’s dustbin—its opponents denounced it as violative of the state constitution. Davenport, also a member of the legislature’s lower house, expressed that the constitution he had helped write prohibited such racial exclusion. “If the [state] Constitution don’t protect citizens from class legislation,” Davenport contended during open debate, “he was sorry that he had been a member of the Convention that framed it and was furthermore sorry that he had voted for it.”


Even though he “was as much opposed to [Black jurors] as anybody,” the former Army lieutenant believed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which Congress, in May 1870, reenacted under the Fourteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause, “provides there shall be no distinction on this question.” Davenport “didn’t want to force negroes on juries but thought that under the laws of the United States, they had rights there, and we had no right to debar them.” Many White folk shared similar misgivings. In July 1865, Ohio Republican congressman James Garfield confessed privately that he harbored “a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way. . . . But colonization has proved a hopeless failure everywhere.” And thus men like Davenport held their nose and downed their gruel.


After a long day of debating the bill, Davenport, a slender-faced White man with full dark hair and a mustache, sat in a barber’s chair. As Black men waited on him, he remarked, “Well, if you niggers know how much I have done for you today, you would wait on me for nothing.” Caste preservationists, though, resuscitated the bill. The Charleston Courier advised readers that “it was hardly consistent to provide for securing intelligent jurors . . . and then flood the jury boxes with ignorance by admitting negroes indiscriminately.”

On February 19, 1873, rancorous debate erupted in the capitol. Representative John J. Thompson commanded the floor and offered his worldview to his colleagues, elbowing them toward the realm of racial subordination.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I want it understood that I am opposed to nigger jurors. I will never consent to make them the equal of the white man. I have many reasons for my position; the most important of which is because a nigger is a nigger. . . . For my part, sir, I would rather have no juries at all than to force white men to sit with them.”

Representative W. H. Reynolds, in opposition, urged his colleagues to accompany him to the enlightened world. “The doctrine that all men are created equally free has been lifelong with me. I have always believed it and have always maintained it. It is but simply justice, and I propose to stand by it to the last.”

These worldviews routed West Virginia toward rival destinations—White-over-Black racial dominance or coequal governance. On March 12, 1873, the legislature limited jury service to “all white male persons, who are twenty-one years of age, and not over sixty, and who are citizens of this state.” Caste preservationism triumphed.

Because of the state’s poverty, White West Virginians especially cherished the racial caste system. Many poor White people constructed their identity on their supposed superiority over “the nigger.” Laws like this one diverted their attention away from a bitter truth—a common oppressor, White men who hoarded a nation’s wealth, subjugated the “nigger” and the poor White man alike. White Supremacy, evil but ingenious, convinced the poor White man to fixate on cultivating anti-Black hate rather than love for economic self-interest. Henry Wise, pre–Civil War Virginia governor, explained that convincing poor White people of their equality with their economic betters hinged on the caste system. “Break down slavery,” he insisted, “and you would with the same blow destroy the great democratic principle of equality among men.”

Since West Virginia never seceded, its Reconstruction proceeded as it did in Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, loyal border states. Beyond the ending-slavery requirement, minimal federal intervention encumbered those states. That hands-off approach, and a small Black population, enabled the Democratic Party’s quick assent in West Virginia. Just four of the eleven southern states, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, had returned to Democratic hands when West Virginia passed its jury discrimination law. Meanwhile, the Republican-led southern states, particularly ones with large Black populations, like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, elected Black men to statehouses that enacted some fairly egalitarian laws.

But White southerners were salivating to reclaim the crown. The Supreme Court upholding West Virginia’s jury law would suggest that caste preservationists could install legislation that expunged Black people from other facets of civic life too. The Civil War and Reconstruction had destroyed the slave system. Caste preservationists needed an answer: “Can we implement laws that explicitly deny black people rights in order to water a new fountain of oppression?”

During the state’s constitutional convention in 1872, Black citizens had petitioned for a provision that would specifically enable Black jury service. The convention’s chairman waved them off. The new constitution, he vowed, would prohibit race distinctions. After the passage of the jury discrimination law, at least two options presented themselves to its foes who believed it violated The Trinity. Sue the state, arguing that the Constitution barred it, or wait until a Black criminal defendant raised the issue at trial, a scenario requiring a crime.

Stand alongside me, on April 17, 1872, in the upstairs back room of a two-level wooden frame house in Wheeling, West Virginia. The Ohio River severs this city in two. Taylor Strauder, his wife, Annie, and her nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Fannie Green, live in the more populous area, which cradles the river’s coastline, with the Appalachian Mountains looming in the eastern sky. Spot the bed, lounge, and rocking chair in front of the fireplace. Notice, on the hearth, that tool normally stored downstairs to chop wood. A hatchet.

Strauder is leaving their home this night after Annie asked him to buy yeast. He enters the nearby Miller’s Saloon instead. In the back room, the biracial carpenter sees a Black man named Elijah Pullins.

“You damned son of a bitch, you better go home,” Pullins taunts, among dominoes-playing patrons. “I suspect there is someone in bed with your wife now.”

Strauder, formerly enslaved in Augusta County, Virginia, doesn’t respond. Such cuckold quips often flew in his direction, especially from Pullins.

When Strauder returns home, he opens the front door and swears he sees a White man fleeing through the back door. He confronts Annie, but she denies the accusation, inciting a fight. The two wedded in June 1871, and trouble defined their relationship. He would insist she cheated on him. She had him arrested for threatening her life once, but they reconciled. They always reconciled. This latest tempest stretches into the wee hours of the morning but relents enough for them to sleep on that bed.

The next morning, Annie wakes up and sits in the rocking chair. Strauder, preparing for work, plops on the lounge, awakening Fannie, asleep under the covers. The couple refresh their quarreling.

He asks Annie, “Where are my shoes?”

“I suppose they are where you put them last night.”

Nearby, Lucinda Thomas prepares her two small children for Annie, her older sister, to babysit this rainy morning. Lucinda reaches her sister’s home at about thirty past six, enters the door, steps in a few paces, and a macabre scene freezes her. Annie seated in a rocking chair. Her head collapsed into her chest and resting on her right arm. A stream of blood rushing down her temple, over her eyes, running off the cliff of her nose, diving onto the floor, and splashing into an expanding crimson pond. About three feet away rests the hatchet with coagulated blood gluing Annie’s hair to its hammer side.

Lucinda hurries to the house of the local justice of the peace, Robert Gillespie, who tells her to alert Officer Robert Junkins at his home while he scurries to the crime scene.

Let’s mix with the crowd gathering outside the Strauder home. See those twelve White men entering? The ones who look like regular citizens? They will serve on the coroner’s jury, which determines cause of death. Gillespie directed the police to summon them. Despite The Trinity, the officers selected only White men. Black men account for 40 percent of the county’s male population.

Many have crusaded for the principle that America must bestow to all the same justice. Equal justice. We cherish this principle for various reasons. For one, a matter concerning an individual’s rights implicates the rights of an entire group. West Virginia cannot deny Strauder his rights because of his Blackness without infringing the rights of the entire race. For the law to afford Strauder equality, he must have it always, not merely when society sees fit to provide him that. Those twelve White men who serve on this coroner’s jury—West Virginia continually replicates this spectacle. But this murder occurred before the state will pass its jury discrimination law. In absence of that law, the police chose to summon only White men.

“Taylor Strauder killed my mother with a hatchet,” Fannie testifies inside the home, her mother’s corpse still on the floor. Gillespie issues an arrest warrant, describing Strauder as a “very light mulatto about thirty-two years of age; about five feet ten inches in stature and stoutly built” with a “rather spare face, with high cheek bones, [who] wore when last seen here a scattering beard on his chin.”

On April 25, some Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police officers caught the first Wheeling-bound train with Strauder in tow. The officers had arrested him in their city shingling a house the day before. When the streetcar stopped opposite Gillespie’s office, the guards removed Strauder from it, allowing an angry mob to punch him with sticks and blast him with insults. Wheeling policemen forged a path through the crowd, and Gillespie ushered Strauder and the guards into his office. Gillespie asked Strauder about his readiness for a probable cause hearing. He replied he could participate the next day.


The guards returned Strauder outside. Cries of “shoot him” and “hang him” flew from the swelling mob. The police formed two lines and, with Strauder placed in between, marched to the jail. Hundreds of onlookers tailed the contingent, berating Strauder the entire way. He passed under the rounded archway of the Ohio County jail and entered his new home, a cell.

The Black members of the mob wanted the justice system to punish the man who had slaughtered one of their own. The system, to produce that outcome, foreshadowed that it would deny Strauder his rights because of his race, a wrong states freely committed when believing courts will pardon them. Black folk would grow accustomed to this posture, seeking protection from a system that deprives them of their rights.

The next morning Strauder sat for his probable cause hearing, held in the jail. Upon learning of Strauder’s lack of legal representation, George Davenport entered the jail. Davenport, the state legislator who would the following year oppose the exclusion of Black men from juries, conferred privately with Strauder, christening a bond that would span more years than either could have predicted. Fortune shone on the moneyless Strauder that day when Davenport, a skilled attorney of seven years, agreed to represent him pro bono.

Fortune shone on Davenport too. Strauder’s defense presented him, a well-respected member of the state bar, his last best opportunity to leave his mark on the profession. Thirty-one years old, Davenport wouldn’t see forty. With no wife or children, he threw himself into lawyering and legislating. A loyal Democrat who called his party “incorruptible,” Davenport, smart and honorable, exhibited a “natural kindheartedness and a freedom from malice and wickedness singularly attractive to those who knew him best,” a friend remarked. Davenport battled alcoholism—during a legislative session in 1873, the Speaker for the West Virginia House of Delegates had the sergeant-at-arms arrest some legislators, including Davenport, for missing votes. Davenport blamed whiskey for his absence. Four years later, he headed a Christian temperance society. One time Davenport, principled, chastised a judge he felt inadequate and threatened to imperil his career. The judge held him in contempt and sentenced him to five days in jail. On another occasion, Davenport scolded an opposing counsel during open court for untruthfulness. That counsel punched Davenport, who returned the blow.

After Fannie and other witnesses testified, the hearing ended—the state proved probable cause. On May 20, 1872, an all-White grand jury indicted Strauder for murder. Davenport twice asked for continuances, stalling the case a year. Not until May 8, 1873, two months after the state legislature passed its jury discrimination law, did Strauder hear a verdict.

“We the jury find the prisoner guilty of murder in the first degree,” said the foreman. Strauder “sank to his seat, overcome, his legs refusing to longer sustain him,” a reporter observed. Two months later, Judge Thayer Melvin sentenced him to be hanged. The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, however, reversed his conviction on an arcane technicality, granting Strauder another trial.

Davenport and his thirty-one-year-old mentee Blackburn Barrett Dovener, who assisted him, studied The Trinity with an eye toward invalidating the jury discrimination law. Within the law office of Davenport & Dovener at 174 Fourth Street, they focused on the Fourteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth referred to slavery. The Fifteenth to voting. But the Fourteenth spoke to equality. Two clauses from the amendment’s first section must have grabbed them.

First, the Privileges and Immunities Clause: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” The “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” refer to the rights Americans possess because of their national citizenship, presenting the opportunity to raise at least two arguments: a narrow one beneficial to Black criminal defendants and a broader one beneficial to the entire Black population. First, they could have argued that Strauder’s American citizenship included a privilege, or a right, to a trial with an impartially selected jury panel. Or, second, that the clause granted an immunity from a state treating a citizen as a member of a degraded caste—an individual’s immunity from castework—a right which the jury discrimination law had violated. But an obstacle stymied those arguments—in April 1873, nearly a year after Annie’s murder, the Supreme Court neutered the Privileges and Immunities Clause in the Slaughter-House Cases.

In 1869, the biracial Louisiana legislature passed “an act to protect the health of the City of New Orleans” in response to the squalor, stench, and unsanitary conditions the butchering industry unleashed upon the city. Plying their trade near schools and hospitals, butchers discarded decaying animal carcasses on unpaved roads, in the Mississippi River, wherever, and leaders partly blamed cholera and yellow fever, diseases responsible for thousands of deaths, on such practices. The law forced butchers to relinquish their fly-swarmed shops and pay to operate from the monopoly Crescent City Slaughter-House, located across the river. Some butchers, White men, sued, arguing that the law violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights.


John Archibald Campbell, a former Supreme Court associate justice who had resigned and then served as the Confederacy’s assistant war secretary, represented the hundreds of butchers who sued the state. He argued that the slaughterhouse law violated parts of The Trinity, including, specifically, the Privileges and Immunities Clause, because it denied the butchers’ right to practice their occupation, what Campbell called a privilege of American citizenship. Campbell spearheaded multiple lawsuits to invalidate laws that Louisiana’s Republican-majority legislature enacted. Previously, the legislature passed laws like one forbidding school segregation and another making race discrimination in public accommodations a crime. Such enactments enraged caste preservationists and set them against anything the legislature passed. Campbell chased a transparent objective—harness The Trinity on behalf of White “victims” to undo works of a legislature elected in a majority-Black state.

Writing the Supreme Court’s five–four majority opinion, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, Republican-appointed, ruled against Campbell but awarded caste preservationists an unexpected bounty. The rights implicated in the Privileges and Immunities Clause, Miller wrote, defining them narrowly, included “the prohibition against ex post facto laws, bills of attainder, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts.” Miller’s argument defied logic—the original Constitution already protected these rights.


Justice Joseph P. Bradley, one of four justices who disagreed with the majority, wrote a dissent that explained the Privileges and Immunities Clause’s true meaning. Bradley honored Congress’s choice to fundamentally alter American democracy, a choice endorsed by the people who voted overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in the 1866 midterm election, where the Fourteenth Amendment rose above all other campaign issues. Bradley observed that people had state citizenship and federal citizenship. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, state citizenship, the primary form of citizenship, provided citizens protection of their civil rights. Federal citizenship was secondary. The Fourteenth Amendment inverted that, making the federal government the leading guarantor of civil rights.

“If a man be denied full equality before the law, he is denied one of the essential rights of citizenship as a citizen of the United States,” Bradley wrote. The privileges and immunities of the citizens—“the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property”—were fundamental rights. They encompassed the rights in the Declaration of Independence, the right to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” which “belong to the citizens of every free government.” Bradley further explained that the rights included in the Bill of Rights, like the right to free speech and peaceable assembly, and against unreasonable searches and seizures, were among those fundamental rights now protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against state intrusion. Simply put, American citizenship had always given the populace a civil rights bucket. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, though, the Constitution contained no express grant of power that allowed the federal government to protect that bucket from state intrusions. The Fourteenth Amendment cured that congenital defect.

“The amendment,” Bradley wrote, “was an attempt to give voice to the strong National yearning for that time and that condition of things, in which American citizenship should be a sure guaranty of safety, and in which every citizen of the United States might stand erect on every portion of its soil, in the full enjoyment of every right and privilege belonging to a freeman, without fear of violence or molestation.”

Seeking to counteract Campbell’s gambit to stymie Louisiana’s biracial legislature, Miller narrowly interpreted the Privileges and Immunities Clause, revoking its utility for the cause of Black freedom. Contending that the West Virginia law violated “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” would, therefore, slam Davenport and Dovener into a roadblock.

The duo ultimately reached for the Equal Protection Clause: “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Court most fully untangled that clause in Miller’s Slaughter-House Cases opinion. “The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes resided,” he wrote, “which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied by this clause, and by it such laws are forbidden.” When West Virginia limited jury service to White men, did it not discriminate with gross injustice and hardship against Black folk as a class? One would think. But if the Supreme Court could impoverish one clause, it could another.

Other West Virginia attorneys, in summer 1874, were exploring the same uncharted and unwelcoming seas on behalf of a Black client. Let’s trek eastward, one hundred miles from Strauder’s cell, to Martinsburg, West Virginia.

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
by Howard W. French
Liveright, 2025



[Publication date: August 26, 2025]
 
Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Foreign Policy

“Howard French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” ―David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

From the acclaimed author of Born in Blackness comes an extraordinary account of Africa’s liberation from colonial oppression, a work that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of modern history.

The Second Emancipation, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild’s contention that French is a “modern-day Copernicus.” The title―referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom―positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.

That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” Determined to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story,” The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French’s consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah’s early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu―including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him “one of the greatest political leaders of our century”―and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.

Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana’s first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah’s radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.

In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

16 pages of illustrations; 3 maps


REVIEWS:


"[An] epic narrative…This is a sprawling book, and the better for it. Mr. French has delivered a panoramic, sympathetic, yet analytical portrait of a global black movement, deepened by his own family connections with West Africa…As the fastest-growing part of the world in population, Africa will matter more and more. And Mr. French is an expert guide to its nuances."
― Robert Kaplan, Wall Street Journal


"French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, Born in Blackness, showed how the making of the modern world wasn’t just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. The Second Emancipation is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era... The Second Emancipation ably treads the line on Nkrumah’s complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism."
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times


"The Second Emancipation, as political and intellectual history, is profound and excellent."
― Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe


"Nkrumah’s odyssey is the subject of Howard W. French’s riveting new book …Nkrumah paralleled Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in his reach and influence. That little is known about him outside of Africa and African diasporic communities is a reflection of the continued marginalization of the continent in the Western imagination... Against the backdrop of the US imposition of travel restrictions on disproportionately African countries, including Ghana, and an enduring proxy conflict in Sudan, French’s book reads as history told in the present tense, at once enthralling and devastating. The Africa of Nkrumah’s dreamworld―stable, prosperous, in charge of its own destiny―is still struggling to be born."
― Vivien Chang, Los Angeles Review of Books

"In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, this book offers a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history."
― Arab News, "What We Are Reading Today"


"In this magisterial account, journalist French (Born in Blackness) revisits the history of the Pan-Africanist movement through the life of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first head of state of the first colonized African nation to gain independence . . . Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the 20th century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement."
― Publishers Weekly, starred review


"A fluent exploration of an important if often overlooked political leader whose ideas still bear consideration."
― Kirkus Reviews


"French adeptly places the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, the first liberated African colony, in the context of wider anti-colonial movements in Asia and the Middle East, as well as Nkrumah's influence on racial justice in the U.S…Despite assassination threats, ethnic rivalries, and failure to achieve his greatest goal of a pan African Federation, Nkrumah’s influence on African and African American liberation remains unparalleled."

― Lesley Williams, Booklist


"It would be as impossible to overstate the importance of Nkrumah as it would be to overstate the brilliance of this study. For too many, Africa as a whole remains an enigma. Howard W. French’s masterwork clarifies the continent, both its history and the backstory to its current conflicts, with remarkable precision."

― Greg Grandin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth


"A brilliant examination. . . . Howard W. French illuminates a period of time when people believed that standards of justice and equality could prevail for African people on the continent and in the diaspora, especially in the United States during the civil rights movement."

― Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello


"An original, provocative, and important work of history. . . . With meticulous research and crisp writing, Howard W. French helps us see and understand the modern world anew. An extraordinary achievement."

― Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life


"Kwame Nkrumah founded a country and became the leading African statesman of the twentieth century. French tells Nkrumah’s story wonderfully well, in all its greatness and complexity."

― Odd Arne Westad, Yale University, and author of The Cold War: A World History


"In prose both lyrical and personal, Howard W. French reveals how civil rights and decolonization were bound together by Garvey’s ghost, Du Boisian internationalism, a long dream of Black power, and a vision of pan-Africanism based less on returning home than on rejecting the world order and the color line that belts it. A tour de force."

― Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


"In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa’s aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head."
― David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
 
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City.



FASCIST AMERICA 2025: This is What Really Needs To Be Openly Expressed And Shared These Daze More Than Ever--It's Known As The Truth. Hang in there Zohran No Matter What, and Remember Always: We Love You

 "I'm for truth no matter who tells it.  I'm for Justice, no matter who it's for or against"
--Malcolm X 
 
 
Zohran Mamdani and How to Be a ‘Good’ Muslim in America


Illustration by Susana Blasco

Listen to this article · 33:13 minutes

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by Meher Ahmad


[Ms. Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.]

A few days before Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a friend and I were speculating about his chances of winning. We indulged in a moment of giddy optimism at the prospect that a Muslim man might actually become the mayor of the city we live in. With the polling available then, it seemed plausible. “If he does,” my friend, Arman Dzidzovic, said, “it’s about to get so much worse.”

Arman was referring to the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer — or even a terrorist himself. Arman, a Muslim like me, felt that the higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. I didn’t disagree.

Then we both fell silent. The shared understanding of what it means to be Muslim in America hung in the air between us.

It’s a confounding time to be Muslim in this country. A degree of Muslim culture I would have never thought possible when I was a kid is now imbued in the everyday lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked every time I hear non-Muslim teenagers say “inshallah.” My friend and I were having this discussion about Mr. Mamdani while sitting in a trendy Yemeni coffeehouse, one of many proliferating across the country as places where young Muslims and non-Muslims alike hang out after hours instead of at bars.

And yet with every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve learned to anticipate the patterns of anti-Islamic hate — after a terrorist attack, the bombing of another Muslim-majority country or simply when a high-profile Muslim enters the public consciousness. We can count on crude, anti-Muslim prejudice to bleed into our social media feeds, with the dogmatic good-versus-evil narratives peddled by politicians coming quickly in their wake.

So it came as no surprise when, within hours of Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, right-wing politicians and talking heads called him “little Muhammad,” accused him of wanting to enforce Shariah and insinuated that his victory could bring about another Sept. 11.

But perhaps more insidious is the pernicious Islamophobia that has morphed in the years since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kind that has seeped into the liberal institutions that claim to oppose racism and prejudice. Their actions have helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to take anti-Muslim attitudes and codify them in policies and law, with far-reaching consequences for Muslims in America. In these spaces, Mr. Mamdani is not “little Muhammad” but instead a virulent antisemite who portends violence for Jewish New Yorkers on account of his criticism of Israel and his faith in Islam.

After two years of war in Gaza and nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, the treatment of Mr. Mamdani, 33, has served as a black light, revealing the flecks of anti-Muslim bigotry that still dapple American institutions. The candidate has become an avatar for many things, but when it comes to Islamophobia after Oct. 7, Mr. Mamdani is the poster child for the double standards that Muslims in America are held to today.

The term “Islamophobia” can seem like a misnomer. Is it really a phobia, the way one can be afraid of spiders or heights, or is it simply a form of prejudice? However you put it, much of the experience of being a Muslim in America amounts to assuaging the fears of others, even if those fears are rooted in bigotry.

Many of us learned how to react to that fear early. After the attacks on Sept. 11, my family, like so many others, put American flags outside our house and on our car. Once I started getting stopped by airport security, at age 11, my parents instructed me to always make eye contact with agents, to speak to them confidently and with a smile. These are the social equivalents of putting your hands in the air, of making it clear you’re one of the “good” Muslims, lest someone with the ability to make your life worse think you’re one of the “bad” ones.

I met with Mr. Mamdani one afternoon last month at his campaign offices, where he recounted similar experiences. “Growing up Muslim in New York City after 9/11 was, to some extent, growing up having been marked as an other,” he told me. “I faced what I think many Muslim kids faced,” he said. “Whether it’s the names, the characterizations, the motivations.”

If his experience coming of age after Sept. 11 was anything like mine — Mr. Mamdani and I are almost the same age — there was a shock to being singled out for our faith after the attacks. A degree of Islamophobia existed in America before that day, of course, but after it a pall of suspicion fell over us all, one that has never fully lifted. As a child, I found it confusing: Why was I, a fifth grader, getting stopped at the airport because I could be a terrorist? The logic didn’t track. But then you live with it, and living in that reality informs how you see the rest of the world. That’s true for Mr. Mamdani, too: “In some ways,” he said, “it was also a preparation for being in politics.”

That preparation is evident on the campaign trail. Mr. Mamdani answers the relentless questioning of his beliefs about Jews, antisemitism, Hamas, Oct. 7, Israel’s right to exist — on and on — with an unwaveringly chipper attitude. Regardless of how he answers them, these “Do you condemn” questions deftly associate him with the actions and phrases that don’t always come directly from him, testing, probing, goading him to misstep. It’s maddening to watch, yet he answers them all, sometimes with a winking sense of humor.

At a town-hall meeting of mayoral candidates hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York in May, he paused in the midst of a similar line of questioning on Jews and Israel, smiled and said: “These are all softballs! Come on!” The crowd tittered.

I asked Mr. Mamdani whether he sees his Muslim identity as part of the reason he’s repeatedly questioned about his views on Israel. “I think it’s part of it,” he said. “I also think my having stood up for Palestinian rights throughout my political career is another part of it.”

It’s not hard to imagine how the consciousness of Palestinian suffering was woven into Mr. Mamdani’s political identity. Raised by his mother, Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian filmmaker, and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Columbia University’s more prominent anticolonial professors, Zohran Mamdani grew up with intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi over for dinner. He was a founding member of Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a regular fixture at protests against Israeli incursions into Gaza well before Oct. 7, 2023.

Since the war in Gaza began, he’s made speaking up for Palestinians a part of his political agenda: As a state assemblyman, he sponsored a bill to prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli settlements, led a five-day hunger strike in front of the White House and was arrested as part of a sit-in organized by Jewish Voice for Peace in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house.

But he is also Muslim, and to be a Muslim now is to grow up with an understanding of the injustices facing Palestinians that is deeper than most people’s. For much of the past two decades, the American Muslim understanding of the Palestinian struggle was part and parcel of the knowledge that our lived reality cleaved away from the mainstream narrative of the war on terror. As our communities were surveilled and our home countries bombed and invaded, what many Muslims knew to be true — that the war on terror wrought chaos and death on hundreds of thousands of Muslims that had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11 — remained a belief we could speak only in hushed tones to one another.

There was “a real sense of contradiction between what was stated and what was actually happening,” Mr. Mamdani told me, when I asked him about his memory of those years. (He was 9 years old on Sept. 11.) “I learned very young, even just in understanding my family’s own history, that no matter if you cared about politics, politics cared about you.”

In New York City, where thousands of Muslims were followed by the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program — later declared unconstitutional — Mr. Mamdani remembers how seemingly basic activities like a visit to a mosque or a soccer field would result in finding yourself watched. “It was the banal. It was the everyday,” he said. “The inversion of innocence and guilt.”

Kashif Shaikh, the head of Pillars Fund, a nonprofit that helps fund Muslim Americans’ cultural and political projects, remembers how hard those years were. “If you were going to speak out against that war,” he said, “they would frame it as ‘You support the terrorists.’”

But as the jingoism that peaked during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began to fade, “We were starting to see a little bit of progress,” Mr. Shaikh said. “There was a lot of building that was happening over the last 20 years.” Muslim political organizations like the Muslim Civic Coalition and the Muslim Public Affairs Council were created or expanded, and as more Muslims rose through the ranks of American society, the veil of fear across the Muslim community in the aftermath of Sept. 11 began to lift.

“Our generation has a confidence in that we have something to offer to the dialogue of New York other than apologizing for what other Muslims did on 9/11,” Ali Najmi, Mr. Mamdani’s election lawyer and a longtime political confidant of his, told me.

At 41, Mr. Najmi is emblematic of the many Muslim Americans who have found their footing in American politics. A child of Pakistani immigrants, he is among dozens of Muslims now helping shape Democratic policy in and out of office, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, André Carson and Lateefah Simon, and Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison.

As mainstream American pop culture embraced more Muslims — Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, Bella Hadid — we’re seen not just as “terrorists,” Mr. Shaikh told me. “We’re seen as full human beings.”

But passing the good/bad litmus test remains a cost of entry for Muslims who aspire to reach the upper echelons of power in American society. Mr. Mamdani is no exception.


Credit:  Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times

It wasn’t until a week before the Democratic primary that one of the “Do you condemn” questions finally gave those ready, even eager, to find fault with Mr. Mamdani the smoking gun they were looking for. Asked by a podcast host what he made of protest chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” Mr. Mamdani responded by first speaking to the fears and traumas of Jewish New Yorkers after Oct. 7 but didn’t denounce either phrase outright: “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”

The backlash was swift, and its repercussions may well follow him even after this race. His critics pounced on the interaction. Multiple Jewish organizations condemned his lack of condemnation of either phrase, and others took the opportunity to denounce him as a material danger to the Jewish community. One example: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Mr. Mamdani was supporting “an explicit incitement to violence” against Jews.

Mr. Mamdani secured more votes in the primary than any other New York Democrat in more than three decades. His win was hailed as a harbinger of hope in the Democratic Party, proof positive that a multiethnic, multiclass coalition could inject energy into the stagnant politics of a party that has otherwise been floundering in the Trump era.

Within hours of his victory, though, social media posts telling Jewish New Yorkers that they were in danger began to proliferate online. Some even went as far as to say that Jews needed to leave the city for their safety. After the first Muslim candidate ever to win a primary for mayor of New York City took the race, one of the first articles this newspaper published quoted a post by the writer Jill Kargman, who said that the election result was “like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK.”

In the months since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been called an antisemite repeatedly online and in person. People often shout it at him as he walks through the streets of the city campaigning. The label has stuck despite the fact that he campaigned alongside Brad Lander, the comptroller, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City, and despite the fact that polling has shown that a plurality of Jewish New Yorkers planned to vote for him.

“When an accusation is leveled against you again and again, no matter how you respond, it sounds as if you are guilty,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And to someone watching from afar, it’s as if you invited the conversation.”

Two years after Oct. 7, the specific accusation made repeatedly against Mr. Mamdani is a familiar one to many Muslims. Hundreds of us — if not thousands — have been sidelined or silenced since under the banner of antisemitism.

“For the first time last year, we saw employment termination climb to the No. 1 spot of request for assistance,” Afaf Nasher, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, told me. “Overnight, CAIR-New York has had to become experts in free speech.”

Ms. Nasher said that many of the firings or employment disputes that come across her desk recast advocacy for Palestinians, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, as inherently antisemitic. Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse at NYU Langone Health, was fired for describing the bloodshed in Gaza as a genocide in an acceptance speech she gave for an award she got for displaying compassionate care to her patients.

In Maryland an elementary school teacher, Hibah Sayed, was told that a sticker of the Palestinian flag displayed on her classroom door (one among many flags, smaller than an index card) could be seen as antisemitic, as was a kaffiyeh she sometimes wore, not to mention a sweatshirt with the words “Gaza: soul of my soul.” She had a spotless record at her school. She kept her job but was told to sign a document stating that she could be fired if she displayed anything to do with the Middle East on her campus. Like Ms. Jebr, Ms. Sayed had no employment issues before Oct. 7.

Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University, has spent years studying the ways in which civil liberties have been suspended for Muslims in America after Sept. 11. She said the perceptions of Muslims as inherently Jew-hating or violent have paved the way for attacks on pro-Palestinian speech. “I say ‘Muslims’ and ‘Palestinians’ together because you cannot disconnect those two, in terms of people’s perceptions in the United States,” she told me. “The reason anti-Palestinian racism is so salient and so effective and acceptable is because it rides on the back of Islamophobia.”

Not all attacks on pro-Palestinian speech are Islamophobic, Ms. Aziz said, but the two often bleed into each other, As American institutions convulsed with protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, anti-Muslim language and incidents — the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian American named Wadea Al-Fayoume, the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, dozens of incidents of mosques vandalized and threatened — were already on the rise. The attempts at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, using antisemitism as a cudgel, were well underway by the time Mr. Trump was elected for the second time. Palestine Legal, an aid organization that supports pro-Palestinian voices facing legal action in the United States, said it received more than 2,000 requests for legal aid in 2024 alone.

With groups like Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation (the same group that devised Project 2025) whose stated mission is to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, Ms. Aziz suggested, we are seeing something comparable to the era of the Patriot Act in the early 2000s, when the quashing of civil liberties became government policy. “It means the future may be worse,” she said. “The more institutional it becomes, the harder it is to combat.”

But the Trump administration has taken the language and institutional policies and codified them. In January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to “combat antisemitism.” The order has given the green light for the Department of Justice to establish a multiagency antisemitism task force, which has, among other things, moved to arrest and deport or, according to the order, “otherwise hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under an vague definition of what antisemitism could entail.

The logical extreme of these policies has already arrived in full force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts, was part of a group that wrote an opinion essay for the campus paper calling for the school to divest from Israel. As a direct result, she was snatched from the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and ferried to a detention facility in an unmarked car. Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal, who both led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, and Ms. Ozturk are among the dozens of Muslims facing the threat of deportation for their protests against Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza.

In all three cases, Trump officials and lawyers have contended that their speech was antisemitic and that their participation in activities protected under the First Amendment amounted to material support of a terrorist group. “We don’t want terrorists in America,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said of Mr. Khalil and others like him.

“The accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer, of being an extremist — these are facts of life for so many Muslims who engage with any part of public life,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And the notion that to stand up for Palestinian rights is to somehow be a bigot is what so many face whenever they express that solidarity.”

Trump administration officials have called Muslims supporting Palestinians antisemitic terrorists, but the trope that Muslims are antisemitic is prevalent in liberal circles as well. “I think liberals have realized it’s racist to assume Muslims are terrorists or terrorist supporters just as a matter of course,” Ms. Aziz said. “But I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to antisemitism.”

Top Democrats have stopped short of calling Mr. Mamdani an antisemite. But when Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York castigated him, they used phrases like “he left open far too much space for extremists” (Governor Shapiro) and said that he had made “references to global jihad” (Senator Gillibrand, for which she later apologized).

With three weeks to go until Election Day, some top Democrats — including the Senate minority leader, Mr. Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who also represent New York — have not endorsed him, despite the fact that he may well become the next Democratic mayor of their city. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would resign before he would back Mr. Mamdani. All cited Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel as a major reason for withholding support.

They continue to hold out despite support for Mr. Mamdani from a number of prominent Democrats, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race last month) and Andrew Cuomo repeatedly suggested Mr. Mamdani is antisemitic.

“One of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” Mr. Adams reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Jewish leaders in March.

“We know all too well that words matter,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Mamdani’s “Globalize the intifada” episode. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”

I asked Mr. Mamdani what he made of accusations of antisemitism when they came from members of his party. “Nothing that has happened in the general election has been as hurtful as what happened in the primary election,” he responded. “It was within a Democratic primary, and so much of our party’s politics is ostensibly in opposition to the Republican Party’s vision of this country. And yet what we saw is that there is quite a bit of room for that Islamophobia within our own party.”

Mr. Mamdani said he’s committed to approaching his detractors from a place of understanding.

“You have to distinguish between that which is said in good faith and that which is said in bad faith,” he said. For those who express their fear in good faith — and he said he extends “good faith to those unless you know otherwise” — he approaches them with the aim of “understanding the basis of the fear.” He added, “Some of that fear is connected to things that I have proposed. Some of it is connected with things that are imagined around what I have said or proposed.”

​​“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who have concerns about me,” Mr. Mamdani said, “because for many of them, they’ve only ever engaged with a caricature of me.”

Correcting that caricature has become one of the key agenda items of the campaign. After his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani had a number of closed-door meetings with members of the Jewish community, particularly groups and congregations that were troubled in particular by his “Globalize the intifada” response.

Among the skeptics is Halie Soifer, the chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a political advocacy nonprofit. She explained to me why the fear of a Mamdani mayoralty should be treated as valid, citing a recent spate of attacks on Jews — the killing of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, the firebombing of a group marching in Colorado in support of Israeli hostages and the arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, which targeted Mr. Shapiro and his family — as a key reason the Jewish community is on high alert.

I asked her what she believes would happen to Jews in New York if Mr. Mamdani took over City Hall. She said Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned that the elected head of the city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is going to potentially give a green light to those who want to inflict harm on Jewish Americans.”

“I don’t think there’s a belief among Jews that he himself would be a perpetrator of violence,” she said, “but there’s a concern that his language is giving a permissive structure to those who may.”

Ms. Soifer listed several issues that she said must be clarified in order to gain the Jewish community’s trust: his past support of an economic boycott of Israel, his refusal to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state rather than as a state with equal rights for all and his definition of what constitutes an antisemitic hate crime.

“We have this rise in anti-Zionist beliefs manifesting themselves in antisemitic violence,” Ms. Soifer said. “People are concerned about their safety,” she went on. “They’re concerned about security, and they want to know that whoever they elect as mayor shares that concern.”

Incidents of antisemitism have undoubtedly increased over the past two years. The F.B.I. recorded more than 4,000 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes since 2023, more than half of them destruction or vandalism of property. This month, an assailant rammed his car into a group of Jewish congregants in front of a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two of the congregants died.

Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told me that many Jewish New Yorkers are navigating their political decisions through this rise in antisemitism. “A lot of liberal Jews are in the middle place, who are afraid of rising antisemitism in the age of Trump but not sure how to feel about a mayoral candidate,” she said. “It surfaces a moment of real reckoning for the Jewish community.”

“There’s a lot of whispering happening,” she said. “Is he antisemitic?” But Ms. Sasson, who has campaigned for Mr. Mamdani, said that once many in the Jewish community get a chance to know Mr. Mamdani, the caricature falls away. “We saw how vulnerably he spoke about the impact of that on him emotionally,” she went on, referring to a moment on the campaign trail in early June when he choked back tears speaking about the accusations of antisemitism he’s been facing. “Cuomo and Adams are here to use Jews as pawns, to use our real Jewish fears,” she said.

There’s a tragic dynamic between antisemitism and Islamophobia in the years since Oct. 7. Jews and Muslims are tiny minorities in this country, both on the receiving end of conspiratorial racism and prejudiced policies now and at various other points in American history. At the extremes of the right and the left, they are often intertwined. The Trump administration’s tactics, which use the accusation of antisemitism as a blunt tool to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, have made the question of whether it is harder to be a Muslim or a Jew in America into a kind of zero sum contest.

As Mr. Mamdani attempts to make inroads with Jewish voters who have brought their experiences with antisemitism to the fore of his campaign, he’s been on the blunt end of racism and bigotry himself.

The expected outbursts from the right against Mr. Mamdani’s socialist policies are paired with racist accusations. There are the openly Islamophobic statements from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an A.I.-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa after his primary win, and Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, who wrote on social media that Mr. Mamdani is “literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”

But it goes beyond online statements. Mr. Mamdani’s office has received a string of death threats since he began campaigning. I listened to a voice mail message left at his office. A man with a deep voice said, “You should go back to fucking Uganda before I shoot you in the fucking head. Your whole family, too. You pieces of shit Muslims don’t belong here. You’re not compatible with our Western values.”

I’ve read hundreds of Islamophobic slurs written online against Mr. Mamdani for this essay, leaving me pained but somewhat unfazed. You get used to it when you’ve lived here your whole life. Hearing the unbridled hate in someone’s voice felt different. In September a man in Texas was charged with making terroristic threats as a hate crime against Mr. Mamdani.

Many politicians, including many of his Democratic peers, have remained noticeably silent as Mr. Mamdani has faced these threats and racist outbursts.

As a Muslim American, I have found the way his party has failed him particularly wrenching. It echoes what so many of us have experienced from the institutions we are a part of, big and small, and the repercussions we have faced in the wake of Oct. 7, no matter how established (or sometimes because of how established) we are. We may feel as though we belong in the communities and circles we are a part of, but advocacy for Palestinians — and advocacy for ourselves — can cast us out of them overnight, like the nurse at N.Y.U.

This is what has made the psychic toll of this particular moment crushing for so many Muslims in America. There has been progress — we do have Muslim politicians, professors, business leaders, cultural icons — but it is matched with the heartbreak of betrayal from the very communities that we believed had embraced us.

Many of us grew up with the images, the never-ending images, of people who looked just like us covered in ashes and rubble created by American bombs. Then, many Muslims felt they could say nothing. Now, as Israel has extended its bombing campaigns beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and even Qatar, merely registering horror or even righteous anger at the state responsible for leaving tens of thousands of civilians across these countries dead still carries consequences.

The arrests and detentions of people like Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk send a message, just as the firing of a nurse does and just as the treatment of a mayoral candidate does. It tells us that Muslim suffering is acceptable and that there is a cost if we dare say otherwise.

Mr. Mamdani, with his dimpled smile and affable attitude, is in some ways an unlikely face for the paradox of the current moment facing Muslims. But his boy-next-door charm might be the reason he’s among the first Muslim politicians to break into the American mainstream the way he has. My Muslim friends and I often joke that he’s our “gold star boy” because of his goody-two-shoes past. (The most dirt The New York Post has been able to dig up on him is that he once pilfered a table while in college.)

When I was sitting in his campaign office, I asked Mr. Mamdani what it was like to be both the face of progress for one community and a harbinger of Islamist evil to another. “It feels like a contradiction, in both the promise of this moment and the backlash to the very thing,” he replied. Our gold-star boy looked a little weary from his day of campaigning, wearier still when he paused to consider the racist vitriol that comes his way. “To be a Muslim in public life is to know that you will face things of this nature. It doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. It doesn’t mean that they are not disgusting,” he told me. “But it also means that they’re not surprising.”

I felt a sense of weariness, too, hearing Mr. Mamdani resign himself to this reality. There’s a shared grief among Muslims right now, one that feels redundant when we express it to one another. Sitting with Muslim friends or family members over the course of these past two years of war, we often speak of the pain of witnessing the horrors coming out of Gaza, a pain that is deepened by the hypocrisy and hostility of many American institutions. “I know,” I often find myself saying, over and over again. “I know.”

The ravages of this war — whole cities wiped off the map, tens of thousands dead, the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history — have had a lasting effect on the Muslim American psyche. Now, even with a cease-fire in effect, it’s difficult to imagine how an end to the war in Gaza could put the genie back in the bottle.

For many of us, the pain comes, in part, from upholding a stoic facade while those who spew venom face few or no consequences. It’s seeing peers casually dehumanize Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians and knowing that calling it out is largely futile if not dangerous. It’s seeing that kind of language echo through institutions as small as an elementary school all the way up to the White House.

It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half of American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel, and a clear majority say they are concerned with starvation in Gaza and Israeli strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Even as many of our institutions have failed us, the American people seem, finally, to be grasping what we’ve known all along.

But Muslims have been made to grin and bear it in America for more than two decades. Watching Mr. Mamdani stand unwaveringly in the face of a stream of anti-Muslim abuse is to witness the distillation of that dynamic in a single person. I’d be lying if I said I think his fate in this particular matter will improve over time. It is a certainty that Mr. Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, will have to contend with even more Islamophobic slurs, on a national scale.

In the face of this, it’s easy to become cynical, even as his popularity marks a moment of triumph for Muslims. Mr. Mamdani sees it differently.

“I used to be quite consumed by forever being a minority — of being an Indian in Uganda, Muslim in India, all of these things in New York City,” he said to me. It’s a sentiment he’s had to express often over the course of his campaign. It’s at once well rehearsed and heartfelt. “I remember my father telling me that to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place, to see promise and to see the contradictions of it.”

Mr. Mamdani finds hope in that tension.

“I was always left with a cleareyed sense of the world that I was in,” he said, “and how to ensure that the contradiction of that world didn’t leave you with a sense of bitterness.”

More on Mamdani

Opinion | Mara Gay

‘They’re Not Avoiding the Things They Don’t Know’

Oct. 7, 2025

Opinion | Jennifer Steinhauer

Win or Lose, It’s Zohran Mamdani’s Political World Now

Oct. 6, 2025

Opinion | Nicole Gelinas

Democrats Have a Real Problem Facing Charismatic Candidates

Sept. 1, 2025



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.