The Zohran Moment

What we can learn about him and his movement from his father's books

I'm feeling the deep significance and pathos of the “Zohran moment.” I want to share some reflections on this, along with my hopes and fears about it in a few posts here. If we were to envision an archetypal opponent of the current Trump regime, we couldn't do much better than 33-year-old, charismatic Zohran Mamdani, who lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Queens with his lovely wife, illustrator and animator Rama Duwaji. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, originally from Uganda, was a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Professor Mamdani has written many books on colonialism and genocide.

Zohran's mother, Mira Nair, is a very successful film director and producer, best known for Mississipi Masala, on the Indian diaspora in the U.S., and Salaam Bombay!, on the daily lives of children living in the slums of Bombay. Zohran, in other words, comes from a literate, multicultural, Leftist background that spans continents and colonial histories — his parents, in their different ways, have sought to illuminate colonialist histories and to humanize the struggles of the poor and oppressed.

Over the last few days, I have been reviewing some of Mahmood Mamdani's books to get a sense of Zohran's intellectual background and pedigree (strangely enough, I did the same with Netanyahu's father, who was a historian focused on Israeli history, months ago). The books include Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, and Citizen and Subject: Decentralized Despotism and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.

I'm finding these books excellent, helpful, and hopeful in some ways. They also hold crucial lessons for our current — extremely dangerous — situation in the U.S. I hope you will follow along with me as I do my best to unpack what seems essential to me here. There are things we must understand as we undertake the difficult task of trying to salvage the U.S. from its current self-destructive path, if that is even possible.

In Neither Settler nor Native, Mamdani argues that the modern nation-state was built not on tolerance and inclusion, as the myth of liberalism would have us believe, but on exclusion and violence. This happened through the construction, “othering,” or demonization of political minorities. He traces the origin of the modern state to 1492, when Spain expelled Jews and Muslims and launched overseas colonization. The Westphalian peace of 1648, which institutionalized religious toleration within Europe, was a later development in the history of the nation-state.

Mamdani contends that modern colonialism and the nation-state were born together, each defining itself by the exclusion of internal or external “others.” Looking at the examples of the United States, Nazi Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine, he shows how national governments and colonialist powers used “indirect rule” to create fragmented societies. Political identity was intentionally tied to ethnic or tribal categorization. This created the potential for mass violence, ethnic cleansing, and brutal civil wars.

In the colonial period, European conquerors abandoned the goal of assimilating colonized peoples. Instead, they embraced “indirect rule,” which means they preserved, politicized, and even amplified or constructed local identities as a way to divide and control subject populations. This strategy created permanent minorities: It turned newly defined ethnic or tribal groups into political units with distinct legal systems and territorial homelands.

Colonial modernity created permanent political identities—“native” and “settler,” “minority” and “majority”—through legal fictions and administrative divisions. These identities were designed to control populations and prevent unified resistance. The colonized were not just dominated physically but restructured epistemically—taught to see themselves through the lens of the colonizer's logic.

When former colonies won independence, their new leaders inherited the imposed colonialist structures. Unfortunately, instead of dismantling them, they often intensified them by embracing the European model of nation-building via cultural homogenization of the majority and demonization of minorities. This led to new forms of exclusion, internal colonization, and, in extreme cases, mass violence.

In When Victims Become Killers, Mamdani explores this thesis by analyzing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 to a million Tutsis were killed in a few short months. I never realized before reading this was that there were no intrinsic ethnic, genetic, cultural, linguistic, or religious differences between the Hutu and the Tutsis. They spoke the same language (Kinyarwanda), practiced the same religion (mostly Catholicism by the 20th century), lived in the same communities, and shared cultural norms. The distinction between them was socio-economic, not ethnic nor racial in the strict sense (a bit like Blue State liberals and Red State conservatives in the U.S.).

Over centuries, Tutsi elites tended to be wealthier cattle herders, while Hutus were more often subsistence farmers. But this was fluid: a wealthy Hutu could rise to be considered Tutsi, and vice versa. There were no physical boundaries, separate territories, nor ritual taboos dividing them.

The colonialists froze this fluidic sitution — a bit like a class system —into a fixed, essentialized “ethnic” difference. This began under German occupation, but intensified under Belgian rule. The Belgians forced Rwandans to declare their allegiance on identity cards, and they supported this by promoting a racialized form of pseudoscience. The colonizers viewed Tutsis as more “European-looking.” They made them into the local elite, enforcing rule over the Hutu majority. In the decades after Rwandan independence in 1962, these categories hardened into political identities with deep resentments and fears attached to them, eventually unleashing a horrific genocide.

I believe we must acknowledge the serious, alarming parallels between the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide and what we see happening in the U.S. right now. If this sounds alarmist, it is because I believe we need to be alarmed.