When Zohran Mamdani, the first brown mayor of New York, was close to the end of his mayoral election campaign in November 2025, he began a speech with an anecdote about his late aunt. He said that as a Muslim, she felt unsafe in New York after 9/11. He became emotional and used the moment to outline a laundry list of racist attacks that had been levelled at him during his campaign, simply for being of the Islamic faith. Importantly, the list of slurs he outlined were not made by hate bots, incels or disaffected armies of keyboard trolls; they were made by American politicians.
Politicians: elected, seemingly educated, diplomacy-forward representatives of the people, are now making racist statements about a fellow political candidate in the 21st century, as a matter of course. Surprising to me was that one of Mamdani’s detractors was a Black man, Eric Adams. From my non-American lens, I presumed that an African-American might stand in the corner of a fellow minority figure. Adams and his brother were brutalised by police as teenagers and constantly discriminated against for the colour of their skin. In 1999, Adams even testified about institutional racism in the New York Police Department, as a policeman himself. Aside from the experience of racism, I assumed the colour of one’s skin signalled whether you understood the struggle for equity in a country like the USA, the so-called Land of the Free. Each day the US resembles more of a police state. Federally-protected racist enforcers brutalise and kill citizens, and racist influencers are given state burials.
But hate speech and violence are being normalised in the mainstream. We simply scroll on, thinking the discrimination and racism that we see broadcast on our screens is happening elsewhere, to other races. The African-American or Latino struggle is ever present in American news media, and across Europe. But with how South Asians span the globe, elsewhere is now here. Elsewhere has become home. From Australia to the Americas and Europe in between, South Asians number in the millions across populations. Census data has us at over 8 million in Europe and 9.5 million in North America. And there are an estimated 6 million of us in the UK alone. As James Baldwin reminded us in 1955, ‘The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.’ Are we unaware of that fact?
“The white man has a ‘culture’ system that makes you and me look upon ourselves as being less than human… it makes us feel that we must always be ‘polite’ to him, regardless of what he is doing to us.”
Malcolm X, Audubon Ballroom, 1964
Standing outside the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Bronx, Mamdani answered his racist attackers in a method that brown immigrants would recognise immediately. He took the high road; he offered the other cheek. He responded with dignity and erudition over instinctive rage. But in that moment when Mamdani bit his lip and faltered, I wondered what might have been had he responded to the malice and bigotry of his accusers in the way that so many alt-right commentators so freely express themselves in media. Namely, with degrees of open racism and an entitled prejudice that are being encouraged by many political classes. Racism these days comes bundled with talking points and manipulated data, and is retweeted with impunity to repeat the lie. Ignorance is weaponised and hate is being normalised. If you believe in something with all your heart, the zeitgeist says, even if it is full of hate, say it loud and proud. ‘Is that not freedom of speech?’ they argue.
So, why might we need a brown Malcolm X? Why not a brown Martin Luther King?
To be concise, Malcolm X broke with MLK’s peaceful philosophy of civil resistance because he felt that inciting his people to action and aggression in demanding equality was a way of responding in kind to the brand of white supremacism and discrimination African Americans were facing in post-war America. Racism had become so normalised in society, X decided it was past time to turn the other cheek. I wonder if we are not in a similar moment for the global South Asian. Have we not turned the other cheek enough? Are we unable to bring aggression even to our speech?
Racism on the Social Media Menu
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Malcolm X, Audubon Ballroom, 1964
In the present era of the internet, an incensed army of extreme right-wing trolls are enjoying the fruits of a movement they originally set out to combat. The right to freedom of speech, equity, and agency, so championed by a recent uptick of frustrated civil and minority-rights activists has resulted in a striking movement of inverse wokeism, composed of the extreme right. That fight for the dignity to exist as equals, that has spanned centuries, has been subsumed by an army of the online ignorant, without a hint of irony. Legions of the anti-woke, ‘take-my-country-back’ crowd seem to be annoyed that they cannot make casual jokes about other races and faces, or claim their masculinity or nationhood without offending other genders, orientations, and immigrants. The leading social media platforms have rolled back their controls of enforced moderation on hate speech, misinformation and racism, citing ‘freedom of expression’. And several prominent politicians in the Global North are making political capital of this by fanning these flames. Freedom and democracy scores are at their lowest in two decades, especially in the Global North with Human Rights Watch commenting ‘the people of America, China and Russia were freer twenty years ago, than they are today.’ Populism, autocracy, and right-wing extremism are back in fashion. High school students today need not struggle to imagine how Hitler and Mussolini came to power; they can simply watch the fascist playbook unfurl on their mobile phone screens, daily.
Lane Brown for New York magazine writes ‘the world is dumber, and we all know it,’ stating that a study finds over one-in-four people in the US ‘is now composed of so-called low-information voters — the type who can’t name their representatives and get most of their news from memes but tend to be more persuadable than their better-informed neighbors.’ When President Trump talks about the US being the best of all time, possibly at everything, ever, I am not sure this is what he had in mind.
Over in the UK, members of the two parties that traditionally split the British electorate, Labour and the Conservatives, are falling over one another to sound more racist and xenophobic than members of Reform UK, a right-wing nationalist party with a projected 30 percent of the British vote[1]. Reform’s thinly-veiled disdain for non-whites, immigration and multiculturalism, is officially packaged as advancing the preservation of British culture. Reform uses language that echoes the Holy Crusades, framing immigrants as domestic threats or coloured communities as foreign incursions. One Reform member of parliament, Sarah Pochin said in a television interview in October last year, ‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people and people that are basically anything other than white.’ Labour and Conservative party members are following suit.
As an example of this, British Home Minister Shabana Mahmood of the UK Labour Party is offering to seize the gold and jewellery off refugees and undocumented immigrants, under the bureaucratic guise of ‘processing them.’ For any Western citizen of South Asian origin to have conveniently forgotten the collective trauma of our countries’ partitions and civil wars, which almost universally included the desperate transport of jewellery and gold over borders as a live-or-die asset, constitutes a form of racial dehumanisation so intimate that it echoes some of the ugliest practices of fascism documented in modern history. Mahmood’s inclusion of this measure to control her country’s borders, despite Britain’s colonial past, is perhaps as ugly as racism and xenophobia shrouded by political expedience might look. I wonder if the British Home Secretary will now be inspired to seize the pennies and pounds collected by the UK’s over 354,000 homeless people to help process them. Because as they say, every little helps.
The rise in popularity of Reform UK should concern South Asians, not least their public endorsement by Tommy Robinson, a notorious former criminal, former British Nationalist, and British Fascist Party member. Robinson once asked his followers (1.7 million on X) to vote Reform at the next general election and led a protest march of 150,000 people through London, labelled ‘Unite the Kingdom’. The protest featured chants such as ‘stop the boats’, ‘send them back’ and ‘protect our borders’. Racist protest is hard work, so many of the marchers stopped for take-away curries and kebabs from immigrant food stalls in Southbank. The apparent lack of intelligence among protesters made headlines, with one popular comment running ‘Nothing says “protecting our borders” like a mid-march bhaji.’
So do we need any more signs that diaspora South Asians are at a crossroads? We migrated and assimilated. We swapped our homespun cotton for hoodies and business suits. Our parents adopted half accents, and we grew up speaking them naturally. We recycled. We paid our taxes. Today we are more than just a few generations of patchwork in a quilt that spans the globe. So, must we remain so urbane in the face of forces that are picking at the threads that bind us? The UN is headed for bankruptcy by July and reportedly 5.8 billion of us live in autocracies today. As the post-war order of the world continues to haemorrhage beyond recognition, are we still going to be the good and silent minority?
It’s a Small World (of Billionaires) After All
Social media’s profiteering from disinformation, tribalism and division has now caught the interest of television news broadcasters. According to a study by MIT and Harvard[4] MSNBC and Fox are actively prioritising inflammatory news agendas on race, immigration, gender and crime. Unsurprisingly, OED’s word of the year was ‘rage bait’ and 2026 continues the ‘turn on, tune in and rage’ mantra. The owner of X, Elon Musk, for all his Nazi-salutes, racist broadcasts and conspiracy theories, has nevertheless been invited to the White House to slash public spending and harvest national databases, while being given a trillion-dollar pay package by his shareholders. There was a time that democratic society might have clipped his wings, fined him or sent him to jail. Instead, Musk’s puerile outbursts and white supremacist ambitions are given free passage to cross the seas, infiltrating British and German borders too. At Unite the Kingdom, he appeared as a herald of imminent race war. ‘You either fight back or you die,’ he offered heroically. All from behind the safety of a keyboard.
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
James Baldwin, The Negro in American Culture, 1961
Today, billionaires own more than half the global news media and their proximity to political power is well-documented. In a moment in history when we are witnessing unprecedented monopolisation of democracy and the media by the alt-right, I wonder where that leaves the humble South Asian? An estimated one-in-four people on Earth is brown and specifically, South Asian. If the rise of a leader like Zohran Mamdani can crystallise South Asian pride and galvanise our global imagination, can we not find it in ourselves to speak the unspeakable and call out the racism and xenophobia we face in our adopted homes a little more loudly? Have we not realised that to be brown and conscious is perhaps to be enraged, all the time?
Where are the hordes of angry podcasters like Ash Sarkar railing against the racism that is prevalent across the Global North? Where are the strident influencer pages like Brown History that call out white supremacy and organise in the west for brown civil rights? Are we limited to the laudable and refined broadcast umbrage of Mehdi Hasan and Shashi Tharoor? Or are there South Asians out there who have simply had enough of walking on eggshells at a time like this? Is incendiary freedom of speech reserved only for the likes of Charlie Kirk and Andrew Tate? Or President Trump who recently called Somalians filthy, Black majority countries, ‘shitholes’ and migrants ‘cut-throats with bad genes?’
Is remaining quiet in the face of such a deluge of ever-present racism and xenophobia truly ‘taking the high road’ or are we simply ducking under the radar till we have our degrees, job offers, or green cards in hand? Are we short of platforms or are we short on spine? If we are everywhere, then why are we so silent? Maybe we are unable to band together because our very real national differences on the continent get in the way. Perhaps we are divided because we are not an amorphous, indistinguishable shade of brown; that dirty noun ‘a monolith’? But globally, which South Asian has not carried the yoke of a collective browness? Are we evading an obvious solidarity when the establishment cannot even tell us apart? Is it inconceivable then that we might banner under one flag for a collective dignity? Is a brown Malcolm X impossible?
Reviewing the Model Minority
We are often told that South Asians abroad see themselves as pragmatists focused on getting ahead — prioritising education, securing good jobs, and assimilating within our adoptive societies (despite problems with the model immigrant narrative.) But at the time of writing, the Trump administration has halted immigrant visa applications from 75 countries, including several South Asian nations with the administration stating officially that it is designed to stop immigrants from ‘grifting off American taxpayers.’ So I took a look at the numbers and they are shocking.
‘According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), immigrants (both documented and undocumented) contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy annually.’[5]
In 2023, that number was over $650 billion. Of that whopping tax revenue, it is estimated that in 2024 South Asians contributed at least half of that. Even undocumented immigrants contributed nearly $90 billion of that figure to US Treasury coffers. So, I looked up the word ‘grifting’ thinking I had misread the headlines, but now I am certain the US administration needs a dictionary. According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, every year, Asian households pay double the national average in tax. Over in Europe, a study found that immigrants to Germany, France and the Nordics, contribute more on average to public finances than natives[6]! Even after accounting for all received benefits and paid taxes. And in the UK another study[7] states that ‘immigrants to the UK contribute around £20 billion in taxes annually, generally paying more in tax than they take out in benefits and services.’
So maybe I have this wrong. Did the State Department mean ‘grafting’ as in ‘work?’ By not broadcasting these facts more widely, are we allowing false narratives about immigrants to persist, thereby giving the political classes dominion over us? Do we let our silence become a new extractable resource for those who command our global communities?
Allegiance is Skin Deep
“There were two kinds of negroes: there was that old house negro and the field negro. The house negro always looked out for his master. When the field negros got too much out of line, he held him back in check. He put him back on the plantation…But then you had the Field Negroes. They were in the majority. They were the masses.”
“I’m a Field Negro.”
Malcolm X, Message to the Grassroots, 1963
Part of the problem is insidious. There is a cognitive dissonance enacted by our would-be allies in the face of this tide of xenophobia. There is treachery in passing when Shabana Mahmood, Kash Patel and Priti Patel, Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, Dave Sharma, and Suella Braverman occupy positions of power but mimic the exclusionary behaviours of the most divisive in their nations. Bluntly put, these powerful people of colour in the Global north, seem to have conveniently forgotten the personal struggles their own families and forebears faced when coming to or naturalising in the West. Academia politely terms this behaviour of ethnic exclusion as ‘nativist mimicry’[8] or ‘defensive exclusion’[9] where naturalised migrants dissociate from the newest members arriving from their ancestral homelands. A less charitable phrase for this phenomenon is ‘pulling up the ladder’[10], where people of immigrant origin, shut the door on those who might look like them, but do not have the acculturation to blend in smoothly in the new homeland. Sounds suspiciously like a phrase better suited to a rat-race than garden variety migration.
Several studies[11] suggest that when migrant communities naturalise in the Global North[12], they have the potential to support minority immigration concerns, but that societal pressure and the desire to assimilate, drives our newly minted Global Northerners to emulate majority concerns such as anti-immigration. One study[13] finds emphatically that ‘Naturalized immigrants are similar to native-born Americans. They are less liberal and less moderate but more conservative than all immigrants. Over time, each generation is slightly more Republican and slightly less Democratic than the previous generation.’ Could this explain Suella Braverman championing the ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign in the UK and defecting from the Conservative party to Reform? Or Priti Patel suggesting that her family were different from newly-arriving immigrants to Britain; that her family members were distinctly more British than those coming in on the boats? Patel’s amnesia is staggering considering she once admitted that her own laws for immigration as UK Home Secretary would have barred the Patels from entering the UK in 1972 when they fled Idi Amin’s Uganda. Perhaps Ms Patel and her ilk have misunderstood the British electoral concept of ‘first past the post.’ What happens to the South Asian in such people when they attain political power? Do they assimilate so well in their new homes that they forget ‘where we all really come from?’
A French study[14] from 2025 regarding political assimilation found that even though naturalised citizens (up to three successive generations) do demonstrate less support for further immigration, ‘African and other non-European origin [respondents] were shown to be strongly supportive of immigration compared to [those of] European origins.’ Could such assimilation and a forsaking of generational ethnicity be a special categorisation of immigrant, altogether? The advent of serving as coloniser of one’s own ethnic lineage might offer a special niche for political leaders who unironically become the faces of campaigns that promote anti-immigration and more severe border controls. Alternately, there is a danger that such model citizens might be claimed as woke success stories. After all, our ladder-pullers have become so colour blind, they fail to see colour, even in the mirror.
Maybe the LLMs Know
So I turned to the machines. I asked a variety of LLMs why a brown Malcolm X did not exist. After suggesting a few mainstream authors, news anchors and academics, they suggested that this was a difficult task. Here’s what they explained.
‘Finding angry or controversial brown figures fighting for respect for their people’ is hard because ‘many South Asian origin public figures operate within systems (politics, culture, media) rather than outside them; radical outsider voices are fewer.’
‘South Asians conform to respectability norms that encourage deference and not making a scene.’
Even the machines see us as cowed.
Gemini suggested that the angriest and most vocal in the brown community are often those protected by academic institutions like Priyamvada Gopal or Sara Salem. However, it suggested that their academic language was actually a disadvantage, making them less accessible to the masses on social media. Similarly, academics and writers like Rajeev Balasubramanyam are leading the charge for a renewed consciousness in brown identity. But is this to say that those of us most able to weaponise intelligence are too verbose to communicate a shared dignity? Or a fight for it?
In House Arab for Bidoun magazine, Ismail Ibrahim calls our collective pragmatism what it is. As the only Arabic-speaking staffer at the New Yorker, Ibrahim details being otherised and ostracised by his editor and peers after his response to October 7th made him seem like a Hamas sympathiser. Ibrahim writes about his struggle between furthering his career ambitions at the cost of his respect.
In the end, he quit.
Do we have the courage to do the same?
As people of colour, we are being policed, brutalised, surveilled, slandered, listed, rejected, cancelled, deported and jailed with a discovery-of-the-new-world fervour that we thought had become unfashionable in 2026. If South Asians as a serious majority in the world do not mobilise against these threats to our culture and communities, we risk becoming irrelevant within a world where racism and xenophobia are leading popular discussion and realpolitik. By reinforcing the good immigrant role or shutting the gates on our ethnic origins, we risk becoming colourless and relegated to the background of a diasporic reality that we have worked so hard to create. In an age when the repercussions for speaking your mind are turning punitive, especially in the Global North where freedom of expression now invites police action, are we missing the proverbial boat on clapping back? Is it so much to expect then that at this moment, a popular, South Asian solidarity of freedom in thought and action, is unattainable? Is a brown Malcolm X truly impossible?
“There will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves and feel for other black people…At that point when you attack one black man you are attacking all black men and this type of black thinking will cause all black people to stick together, and this type of thinking also will bring an end to the brutality.”
Malcolm X, TV interview, 1963
References
[1] IPSOS poll at the time of writing
[2] Dey et al., (2025) Polarization or Bias: Take Your Click on Social Media
[3] Several institutions including the Brookings Institute, Stanford, PNAS, Knight First, etc. have published findings in studies on algorithms in social media that demonstrate that poor quality news or information that stimulated hate, fear, anger, and division, contribute greatly to user engagement and therefore are more encouraged by social media programmers for being more profitable.
[4] Noy, S and Rao, A (2025), The Business of the Culture War
[5] Gemini query: ‘How much tax do South Asian immigrants or people of South Asian origin pay in the USA?’, January 2026.
[6] Projecting the Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the European Union by Christl et al., Fiscal Studies, 2022; updates for 2023–25 detailed
[7] The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the UK, Carlos Vargas-Silva, Madeleine Sumption, Ben Brindle
[8] Bhabha, Homi K (1984) Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.
[9] Williams, Kipling D (1997) Social Influence: Vol. 3. Current issues in social psychology (edited by C. Sedikides and M. B. Brewer)
[10] Chang, Ha Joon (2002) Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective
[11] Bennour, Luders, et al (2021), Where and Why Immigrants Intend to Naturalize: The Interplay Between Acculturation Strategies and Integration Policies, Political Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 3 pp. 437-455
[12] A grouping of wealthier, industrialized nations that generally dominate technological advancements, global security, and international governance institutions, characterized by high levels of economic development, high per capita income, established democratic institutions, and strong human and societal capabilities.
[13] Nowrasteh and Wilson (2017) Immigrants Assimilate into the Political Mainstream, Cato Institute Economic Development Bulletin.
[14] Vasilopoulos, P., McAvay & Robinson, J. (2025), Immigrants’ attitudes towards immigration: convergence towards majority views or ethnoracial polarization? Ethnic and Racial Studies
[16] https://www.theguardian.
