THE saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ traces its origin to several African countries but it gained Global North popularity when Hillary Clinton chose it as a title for her book on how you needed a community to raise a child. What was a ‘duh’ moment for us was apparently a surprising revelation in the US, to the then largely white majority, whose children were reared by parents, maybe some family, childcare centres, or, if they could afford it, nannies.

Their version of community is vastly different to ours. Even though I grew up abroad, I knew instinctively that my Filipino best friend’s mother in grade school was ‘aunty’. Our extended family included other Pakistani families and one special aunty can scold me today, like she could 40 years ago.

As we grew older, and the trend of sleepovers became the norm, my parents gave in to our demands, but there was always a check of sorts they wanted to do, much to our annoyance. It wasn’t about our safety per se, because we lived privileged and sheltered lives in suburban areas but about who will be there, who will take care of us, where are the parents from? I was only allowed to go on my first sleepover, aged 10, because the girl’s father was from Cameroon. They are like us, they said, without explaining how they came to these decisions.

We were raised by an extended family of Pakistani uncles and aunties, Ethiopian nannies, Palestinian, Lebanese and Indian (imagine!) aunties and uncles — all of whom watched over us.

Mamdani is a product of communal parenting.

But not everyone understands this concept of what constitutes family as the recent exchange between Zohran Mamdani and his detractors showed. Mamdani referenced his ‘hijab-wearing’ aunt who feared for her safety on the subway following 9/11. He was calling out his opponent Andrew Cuomo for being Islamophobic. Mamdani’s detractors found a photo of his father’s sister without a hijab and accused him of lying, with the right-wing newspaper New York Post leading the charge.

“How can you, Zohran Mamdani, convince New Yorkers to go and vote for you when you just said you lied?” asked a radio host. “It’s not a lie,” Mamdani responded. “My father’s cousin is my aunt. That is how I referred to her all my life.”

This seemingly irrelevant issue became a hot topic for days with immigrants explaining what ‘aunty’ means to them. That one group can find it so alien an idea was not surprising but the attitudes in the media were. Because it showed the media was not representing audiences fairly.

Mamdani is clearly a product of communal parenting — that is his appeal to the scores of immigrant communities he reached out to and spoke to and made them feel seen, heard. His policies also reflect building community, caring for each other, not being taken advantage of. And it’s unsettling everyone across the media.

You may remember the New York Times’ ridiculous attempt to take down Mamdani for identifying as Asian and African on his college application. Then there’s the Washington Post who titled their editorial as ‘Zohran Mamdani drops the mask’ following his victory. They described him as Generalissimo Mamdani and his acceptance speech as “laced with identity politics and seething with resentment”. They declared his politics wasn’t about unifying but “about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to ‘the bosses’ who exploit workers — and then crushing them”. Mamdani’s actual speech was anything but that. The Wall Street Journal published 50 editorials attacking Mamdani since June. The right-wing media has predicted that New Yorkers will “flee communism” and seek refuge in Miami.

Earlier this mo­nth, the Columbia Journalism Review reported on how the legacy media was being “weird and hostile” to Mam­dani. They share a common aim, the writer notes: “Their commitment to keep change modest, to keep reform within reason, to keep the basic arrangement of things steady.” Things won’t remain ‘steady’ as demographics change and younger audiences challenge the status quo especially in policymaking that has so far been rooted in anti-poor laws.

Mamdani changed the very nature of the electorate by getting new voters to register and by targeting the young. When he threw his hat in the ring he was seen as ‘a protest candidate’ with no chance of winning, but as the Brookings Institute noted, he had two assets “skilled organising and social media mastery”. I would add he had an army of aunties and uncles behind him too — the taxi drivers, the bodega owners that Mamdani thanked for example — who dreamt of a better future for their children.

The media would be foolish to continue adversarial reporting on Mamdani because they stand to lose audiences. Instead they should learn from Mamdani and connect with their readers to tell stories that matter to them.

The writer is a journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2025