Mamdani Transition Pick Says the Ivies “Don’t Understand” Her Work, Then Calls Science “European” and America Rotten From the Start
Chaumtoli Huq is a professor at CUNY School of Law, founder and editor of the activist law and media nonprofit Law@theMargins, and a member of Zohran Mamdani’s transition team on the Committee on Worker Justice.
“For me to be truly democratic, it has to be anti-imperial and anti-colonialist.”
In this clip she frames “objective truth,” rationalism, and reason as ideological products of the European Enlightenment, then recasts science as a culturally specific European project that must be “named” and separated from.
“So, it is a particular type of science, right? That is European. That is not to say that scientific knowledge and methodologies in and of themselves are problematic, but I think we have to kind of name that and sort of distinguish ourselves from that.”
This is a great example of ideological laundering. The hedge doesn’t fix the point. It’s how the point gets smuggled in. You can’t reassure people you’re not anti-science while telling them science is essentially European and something you should “distinguish ourselves from.”
It’s also a rewrite of reality. Human beings across civilizations built the foundations of math, medicine, astronomy, engineering, and empirical inquiry. Reducing reason and evidence to “European” is historically illiterate and racist because it writes everyone else out of humanity’s shared intellectual inheritance.
Huq rounds it out with the usual endpoint of this worldview, the claim that the law is not merely flawed or misused, but implicated in inequality from the very beginning.
“But we have to actually understand that law has been implicated in this since the United States’ founding.”
This is the framework being plugged into the Worker Justice team and New York City governance. Not evidence-based policy, but a radical form of politics that treats truth as suspect, science as tainted, and the American legal order as guilty at the root.
And the opener tells you everything you need to know. “I dare say if I was at Columbia, I don’t think I would get tenure. I don’t think that this kind of work or other elite legal institutions, they don’t understand the work that I’m doing.”