New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been playing up his outsider status, and in a recent campaign video he claimed he grew up in the “third world.” But even if he lived for a short time in abject poverty in Uganda (and there’s no evidence he did), he certainly lived a comfortable — or as he put it himself, a “privileged upbringing” — from the age of seven years old and on in South Africa and the U.S.
In the video, Mamdani claimed he “grew up in the third world” and also insisted that when he moved to the U.S.A., it was “shock to his system” to find that Americans didn’t speak about Palestine with a sense of “solidarity” like he did growing up outside the U.S.
But is any of that really true? It would seem very doubtful if it is.
For one thing, Mamdani most certainly never suffered under anything like a “third world” upbringing.
He may have been born in the poorer country of Uganda in 1991, but his family very soon moved to the more metropolitan country of South Africa where he spent his youngest years. There he attended a private school called St George’s Grammar School in Mowbray, Cape Town, from 1996 to 1998 before he emigrated to the U.S. St George’s was no backwoods, one-room school house, either, as tuition there cost about $4,000 a year.
His education got even more exclusive starting in 1998, when his family moved him to America. As a child, Mamdani attended the Bank Street School on the Upper West Side, a school that charges $69,000 a year in tuition. And by 2006, he was enrolled at Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s most prestigious high schools. He graduated from that school in 2010.
Throughout his young life in the U.S., Mamdani lived in Columbia University housing as his father worked at the school.
As to his claim about how he “grew up” speaking about Palestine, that also seems suspect.
In the video Mamdani says, “when you grow up as someone especially in the third world, you have a very different understanding of the Palestinian struggle. It is one that is framed in terms of empathy and solidarity. Specifically growing up in South Africa post apartheid, you know, it felt as if one of the most natural things to wear around my body was a keffiyeh. And so then to get here and see all of a sudden this topic was not only one that was discussed very differently but was entirely taboo, it was a shock to my system…”
Again, Mamdani was seven years old when he moved to the U.S. Was a seven year old living an upper middle-class life in South Africa really parading around in Palestinian keffiyeh garb? And was a seven year old really cognizant enough about politics that when he moved to the U.S. he intellectually understood how different Americans speak about the Palestinian conflict?
Mamdani has also admitted that he had a “privileged upbringing.” In an interview with the New York Times, he told the paper, “I would say I had a privileged upbringing. I never had to want for something, and yet I knew that was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers.”
Director Mira Nair and Music Supervisor Zohran Mamdani attend the Gala Screening of Disney’s ‘Queen Of Katwe’ during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square on October 9, 2016 in London, England. (Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Disney)
Just who are these doting parents? Hardly third worlders, though both are arch leftists, as Breitbart News chronicled.
Mamdani’s father is Mahmood Mamdani, and is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University.
His father also serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda and was the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) from 2010 to 2022. He is a chaired professor at Columbia, and graduated from Harvard with a PhD.
His mother is Mira Nair, is a member of the Hollywood elite and is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
Nair has had a long and successful career. She was a hit maker in Bollywood, and her film, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and also received a BAFTA nomination.
Nair also directed Disney’s 2016 film, Queen of Katwe, as well as an episode of the Disney streaming series National Treasure.
Mamdani is also a long-time, close personal pal of actor turned political operative Kal Penn, who served in the Obama administration. The Harold and Kumar star recently spoke about his “love” for Mamandi in a recent Instagram post.
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