Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda.

Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was black and Asian American.

Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context — and makes me think there is an interesting parallel between the pseudocontroversy over his college application essay and the pseudocontroversy over the “globalize the intifada” phrase.

As Beinart points out, not only did most if not all of the commentators on the college application controversy completely overlook the facts of Mamdani’s family story but they also failed to elucidate the meaning of that story to Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani was born in Uganda, to a father, Mahmood Mamdani, who was part of a family of Gujarati Muslims from India that had settled in what is now Tanzania and then moved to Uganda when Mahmood was two years old. The Mamdani family firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent from Uganda, including Mamdani’s family, claiming that because they were not black, they were not African.

If you’ve ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out in the early 1990s and recently rewatched, it tells that story with great poignancy and humor, and of course it was made by Zohran’s mother and Mahmood’s wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair. Mahmood also has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian Africans, if you will.

This was the family story, passed on from one generation to the next, that was so critical to Zohran Mamdani’s formation, and that he tried to fit, at the age of seventeen, into the boxes of American affirmative action.

Like so much else in America, the commentary flew right over the complicated reality of that family story, refusing to see in it anything other than a mirror of America’s own national story around the question of race and ethnicity.

The controversy reminds me quite a bit of the fracas over the “globalize the intifada” phrase. Not a phrase that Mamdani himself ever uses, but as he tried to explain to people, it’s a phrase that has meaning outside the Jewish-Israeli and Jewish-American understanding of the phrase. The fact that so many pro-Israel voices, not just in the media and the establishment but all across social media, absolutely refuse to even countenance the possibility that there might be a meaning to the word “intifada” apart from terrorist violence and Jew-killing, is not of a completely different category from the refusal of media and establishment and social media voices to see the Mamdani college application story through anything other than the American racial lens.

In both cases, there are genuine, and genuinely large, historical and political and moral sensitivities at play. In both cases, there is a historically subjugated, dominated, and nearly destroyed group: black Americans, in the case of the college application story, and Jews, in the case of the globalize the intifada story. In both cases, we also have two other peoples involved, who also have been subjugated and dominated and nearly destroyed: Palestinians in the case of Israel, Indian Africans in the case of Idi Amin’s Uganda. In both cases, we can see how the experiences of one subjugated people can be used to preclude any understanding of another subjugated people.

Bringing some understanding to that kind of story — where the experience of one group of victims is used to elide or occlude the experience of another group of victims — is partly what defines Mahmood’s (the father) academic and intellectual project. One of his best books is called When Victims Become Killers. It’s about the Rwandan genocide, which was committed by the Hutus, a historically subjugated group, against the Tutsis, which had been a more privileged group, but it sheds light on so many of our contemporary political arguments, where one group, like Jewish people, historically persecuted and subjugated and exterminated, come into positions of power and then use their history of victimization as an argument for dominating another group, like Palestinians.

More pertinently, it’s about how the language of victim acquires such venomous currency, creating the conditions for all kinds of nasty politics.

Incidentally, that sort of language and dynamic is hardly limited to the histories of ethnic conflict and ethnic/racial persecution. It’s at the heart of conservatism, not just in our contemporary moment but from the beginnings of conservatism as an ideology. As I argued in The Reactionary Mind, it wasn’t the Left that invented the category of the victim. It was the Right, in the form of Edmund Burke, who understood more shrewdly than anyone how the language of victimization can be used as a medium of power.

To me, one of the promises of the Mamdani campaign, quite apart from where you stand on any one of these particular issues, is that he opens the aperture of our understanding about these issues, and helps us move beyond some of the stuckness we’ve been in when it comes to these questions.