In 2018, a socialist bartender from the Bronx named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked everyone (even herself) by unseating the 5th-highest ranked Democrat in the United States House of Representatives. The secret to her success was a relentless “ground-game”—hundreds of volunteers who knocked on doors, made calls, and generally pounded the pavement in her district, which covers part of the Bronx and a big chunk of northern Queens, New York. Many of those volunteers were mobilized by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. The DSA has been around in one form or another since the early 1970s, but it became a force to be reckoned with after the 2016 election, when thousands of people, galvanized by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 bid and angered by Donald Trump’s win, began flocking to the organization. (With fewer than 7,000 members in May 2016, DSA membership now exceeds 55,000, with more than 180 local branches nationwide). Since then, it has helped propel socialist candidates to national (Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan) as well as state-level elected offices. A recent show of muscle was again in New York City, where it brought a queer, Latinx, socialist public defender named Tiffany Cabán just 55 votes short of defeating a machine politician in the Democratic primary for District Attorney of Queens. Now that same New York City DSA chapter is putting its weight behind a “squad” of candidates for statewide office. One of those candidates is the Ugandan-born and partly South African-raised Zohran Kwame Mamdani.

Mamdani, whose parents happen to be the prominent Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani and Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, is a 28 year old rapper and foreclosure-prevention counselor running for New York State Assembly. Below is his conversation with William Shoki, a staff writer at Africa Is a Country, about identity and class, running for office, and what it means to run as a socialist in America.