After Zohran Mamdani became the presumed Democratic nominee for New York mayor last week (which this week was made official), elected Republicans erupted with a racist and Islamophobic backlash that should have shocked the nation’s collective conscience — but this is 2025, and Donald Trump is back in the White House.
Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., dubbed Mamdani “little muhammad” and called for the Trump administration to consider denaturalizing and deporting him. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said his rise was a sign that New York had forgotten 9/11. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted an image of the Statue of Liberty in a black burqa.
What I’ve come to realize over time is that the brochure promise of American multiculturalism comes with an asterisk.
In a comment I found particularly repugnant, Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, commented on a 2023 video interview in which Mamdani eats rice with his hands while discussing his heritage — Mamdani’s parents are Indian, he was born in Uganda, and he moved to New York when he was 7 — that “civilized people in America don’t eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.”
The racism has not been confined to the right. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., falsely claimed that Mamdani has made “references to global jihad.” (She later apologized.) During the Democratic mayoral primary, a leaked mock-up of a mailer from a super PAC backing former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo showed an image of Mamdani that appeared to make his beard look darker and thicker than it is. (A spokeswoman for the PAC told The New York Times that the image had been created by a vendor but was not going to be used; however, the leak circulated widely on social media.)
Mamdani is now in the crosshairs of the president. Trump has relished the opportunity to launch a new birtherism campaign, questioning Mamdani’s citizenship, and threatened to arrest him if he does not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as mayor (assuming he wins his general election). White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has declined to rule out Ogles’ call for denaturalization proceedings, saying the congressman’s claims “should be investigated.”
The concerted attack on Mamdani reveals something crucial amid Trump’s legal offensive against the meaning and rules of American citizenship: Multiculturalism is not just a “nice-to-have” quality of democracy. It helps hold the whole thing together. Without it, democracy tilts quickly toward something resembling fascism.
The way Mamdani’s critics have used his ethnic and religious background as a weapon against him is a phenomenon I know well. I was born and raised in the United States as the child of Pakistani immigrants during George W. Bush’s war on terror. I saw firsthand how American identity can seem to vanish when you’re on the wrong side of an authority figure or a political debate.
I’ve experienced a lot of the standard fare for a male with a Muslim-sounding name and some darker features: invasive racial profiling while traveling, racist and violent harassment on the subway, racist harassment by the police, xenophobic questioning about my background from people both well- and ill-intentioned and racist jokes at most places I’ve worked.
The use of racism to delegitimize my political views has been a persistent frustration. As a journalist of color, I’m used to my work being met with racist responses over social media and email on a near-daily basis. For the most part, I’m able to tune it out.
But I’ll admit to being occasionally rankled by reader messages laying out the “reasons” I do not belong here because the values of “your people” or “your culture” or “your Quran” (I’m sure this crowd does not care that I’m a fervent atheist). And to be clear, these racist notes are not exclusively from MAGA die-hards. Some of this dreck comes from self-described Democrats. For example, ostensible liberals have claimed my criticisms of Kamala Harris could only be explained by the sexism inherent to my ancestry.
Right-wing media has taken plenty of swings at me over my perceived foreignness. In 2023, a column I wrote critiquing the imperialistic undercurrents of “Top Gun: Maverick” went viral across the right-wing media ecosystem and inspired an entire panel discussion on Fox News. In a blatant dog whistle, the New York Post included passport photos from my Instagram account. The Daily Mail got its fix by citing random social media posts saying the Pakistani constitution would not allow me to get away with my column — as if that had some bearing on what an American could say in the States — and insinuating that I was an ingrate, rather than someone exercising my rights. I was doxxed, and my inboxes were filled with death threats and the “get out” variety of racist insults. The subtext of it all was: How dare you come into our country and say this.
What I’ve come to realize over time is that the brochure promise of American multiculturalism comes with an asterisk. In the political arena, first-generation Americans and racial minorities are celebrated under certain terms and conditions, but if they violate them, their status can just as quickly be used to stigmatize them as alien and un-American. The project of inclusiveness can be rescinded when the citizen in question becomes politically inconvenient. In the hands of right-wing nationalists, it is a tool for intimidating and culling the opposition.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist favored to win the mayorship of the biggest city in America, has violated the terms and conditions. He has made the mistake of being an immigrant Muslim, a charismatic leftist and an unapologetic critic of Israel all at the same time. In an earlier time, Mamdani might have been attacked purely at the rhetorical level. But coming as Trump attacks citizenship rights, free speech and due process, the attacks on Mamdani foreshadow a ghastly future: an America that uses vulnerable citizens’ undesirable political views as a pretext for stripping them of citizenship. At the very least, we’re seeing a political movement that seeks to enact that get out vision.
Mamdani recognizes the way racist attacks operate as a tactic to pick off political threats. Here is what he said in response to Trump’s threats against him:
He said those things about me … less so because of who I am, because of where I come from, because of how I look or how I speak, and more so because he wants to distract from what I fight for: I fight for working people. I fight for the very people who have been priced out of this city, and I fight for the same people that he said he was fighting for.
Robust multiculturalism and democracy are intimately interconnected. When immigrant rights are honored and first-generation Americans’ citizenship is considered as irrevocable and full as white citizens’, then it makes it far harder for Trump and other right-wing nationalists to try to redefine the criteria for citizenship and have the country’s aspiring autocratic leader pursue the idea of granting and rescinding citizenship at will. That requires sticking by multiculturalism consistently, because a principle abandoned at a time of discomfort or inconvenience is not a principle at all.
