Blessings for the New Year: Gratitude, Lineage, and Where Power Actually Comes From

The Gregorian New Year has arrived quietly for me the past few years. Each January, I am asking the same questions: What did I survive without properly thanking the ground beneath my feet? Who is not here because I am? Who is here because I am? Who is the reason I am here at all?

And yet, every so often, a public moment interrupts that training. This week, while watching Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s inaugural address, I was deeply struck by how he began. If you have been keeping up with Zohran’s campaign, then you know this is not new. Before policy or his vision, he began with gratitude.

He thanked the people. He thanked organizers. He thanked the city. He thanked his parents. And then his wife. It was simple and stepped out of what we have come to expect from political theater. And for me, that is why it matters. In a world that rewards projection, Mamdani chose orientation. He pointed us, those in the crowd, those watching from home, even those far from New York—backward and inward, reminding us that no one arrives at power alone. That leadership is not born in isolation but shaped slowly: by kitchens, by love, by being believed in before you were legible to the world.

To thank one’s parents publicly is to name inheritance, not just of values, but of labor. It is to acknowledge the unpaid work, the emotional scaffolding, the risks taken long before there was applause. To thank one’s partner is to admit interdependence in a culture obsessed with autonomy. It is to say, plainly: someone held me steady when I could not afford to fall.

And this way of beginning with gratitude, with naming what holds us, does not come from nowhere. It comes from lineages and communities that teach gratitude as obligation rather than performance. From traditions where you are taught to thank the land before you take from it, to name the people before you speak for them, to acknowledge what precedes you before you claim authority. This is the ethic that land acknowledgements emerge from. Indigenous ways of knowing insist that the ground beneath us is not inert property but living relation, carrying memory, displacement, and care. To acknowledge land is to admit that none of us arrive unencumbered, that every institution stands on top of someone else’s survival. When gratitude leads public life in this way, it echoes those traditions and insists that legitimacy begins with recognition, not permission. We do not ask the land, we thank it, we recognize it, we speak and hold conversation with the land, the way we speak to, with and of our elders.

So you think, okay a couple thank you’s, what’s the big deal even? The big deal is that we are taught power must appear self-contained. We are taught to narrate success without witnesses. And this is where gratitude becomes political.

In this country, legitimacy is often measured through credentials. Degrees. Titles. Proximity to institutions. That’s the big deal. We trust lawyers, courts, and formal expertise to tell us what justice looks like. We assume the people most qualified to govern are those trained to argue within the system as it exists. Mamdani’s political formation disrupts that assumption. He does not come from the dominant legal pipeline that shapes much of American political leadership. His grounding is not courtroom-first. It is movement-first: shaped by organizing, tenant advocacy, and coalition work. Legal training teaches discipline, defensibility, and restraint. It asks what is permissible, what precedent allows, what will survive judicial review. That work matters. But it can also narrows imagination. The demands are often softened before they are even spoken, shaped to fit institutions that were never designed to deliver justice at scale.

Organizing begins elsewhere. It starts with people naming harm before it has legal recognition. It asks what survival and dignity would actually require, even when the answer has no pathway through the courts yet. Organizers understand something the law eventually concedes: rights do not become reasonable because they are correct; they become reasonable because enough people are willing to fight for them together.
This is why Mamdani’s gratitude matters so much. Because it is not about him. By thanking people before policy, organizers before institutions, lineage before legitimacy, he signals a politics formed outside the courtroom and oriented toward collective power. His words do not reject the law but they refuse to pretend that justice begins there.

And there is not doubt that public gratitude, especially from men in power, can function as performance. When men thank their wives on national stages, it often occurs after legitimacy is secured. The gratitude arrives at the end, ceremonial and contained, a softening gesture once authority is already intact.

What made Mamdani’s gratitude feel different is timing and posture. He does not thank his parents and wife as an accessory to power, but as its precondition. His words do not say look how gracious I am, but look how held I have been. There is no distancing from dependency, no insistence on self-mastery. Intimacy and lineage are named as foundational to public life. And even when there’s a tiny part of me that says, well a campaign manager could have prepped him to thank everyone, I also recognize that we live in a culture that loves to dismiss care the moment it appears strategic, as if preparation can cancels someone’s sincerity. Movements are not built on spontaneity, they are built on repetition, discipline, and chosen values. If gratitude was practiced, that does not make it hollow. It makes it intentional.

What matters is not whether the words were practiced. What matters is that they were chosen. In a moment where he could have amplified himself, Mamdani amplified relationships. In a culture that rewards dominance, he allowed dependence to be audible. That choice teaches us something: that politics does not have to pretend it is loveless to be serious. That public life can make room for tenderness without collapsing into sentimentality and acknowledging who carried you does not weaken authority, it reorients it.

For those of us raised in immigrant, diasporic, or working-class households, gratitude is not abstract. It is every day clock-work. It lives in language like mehar, dua, shukrana. It lives in prayers said for children who will leave and still carry the house in their chest. Gratitude is how we refuse erasure. As we step into a new year—one already heavy with uncertainty—I don’t want resolutions that ask me to become someone new. I want practices that help me remember who made me possible. So as I think of my people, I think of ardaas (prayers) and jakare (call and responses). And here are mine:

May we resist the myth of self-making. May we name our people out loud. May we thank those who loved us when there was nothing to gain. May we understand that gratitude is not weakness, it is orientation, the posture that allows us to remember how possible, infinite, and beautiful we are when we are united.

And I want to end by naming the people who make all of this possible long before it is legal, legible, or praised: the organizers.

The ones who are paid too little, if they are paid at all. The ones whose families ask when they’ll get a “real job,” not because they don’t love them, but because the work has no clean title, no ladder, no promise of stability. The ones who do not get to say this is my career, because organizing is still treated as something you grow out of rather than something the world grows because of.

Organizing is not always seen as prestigious. It is not taught as a respectable ambition. It is learned in living rooms, on sidewalks, through grief and repetition and refusal. It is learned by people who choose collective survival over individual advancement, again and again. To those organizers: thank you for holding the line without applause. Thank you for building power in a culture that only knows how to reward visibility. Thank you for making the world more livable even when it does not make your life easier.

You are not waiting for a “real job.” You are doing the real work. The long nights, cold days out, knocking on doors, convincing the rest of us to give a flying F about the state of the world.

If this year asks us to remember who held us, then it must also ask us to remember who is holding us still. Who are you remembering and thanking?