Despite his own privileged path to power, or perhaps because of it, the son of a Columbia University professor and a movie director is campaigning as a socialist intent on redistributing New York’s wealth.
At a panel in Harlem in February, New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani discussed a piece of proposed legislation that would strip Columbia University of various tax breaks and redirect the revenue to fund the City’s university system. Mamdani’s no stranger to Columbia—his father is a Harvard-educated, renowned professor there, and he grew up in university-owned housing. “Columbia was our first landlord,” he told the crowd, according to an account in the student newspaper.
Today, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, proudly rejects the elite circles—his mother, also Harvard-educated, is an award-winning director—where he got his start. He lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, owns no car and lists just one major asset in his financial disclosure, several acres of land in his native Uganda that he acquired at least a decade ago. And his social media-savvy outsider campaign to become New York’s next mayor has carried him to polling neck-and-neck with the other frontrunner, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who’s pitching himself as an experienced hand on the wheel in a turbulent time. No matter what happens in the Democratic primary today, many believe that both men will stay in the race to run on a third party line.
Mamdani was born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in 1991, the same year his Indian-American filmmaker mother Mira Nair released her second movie, “Mississippi Masala,” starring Denzel Washington. That was just three years after her debut feature film “Salaam Bombay!,” which depicted the lives of children living in the city’s slums, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
