I started receiving the photos and videos not long after Zohran Mamdani ’14 was announced as the winner of New York City’s mayoral race. In one, a nine-year-old Pakistani American in Virginia leaps for joy, his mother desperately guarding the TV for fear he might crash into it. In another, a Jewish friend in Seattle holds her wife as they dance the salsa and proclaim Mamdani to be their mayor.

“This is what it means to be seen,” a Palestinian American friend in Los Angeles texted me, he and his wife beaming as they watched the results.

Those faces: all of them beautiful. All of them doing things I hadn’t seen in some time, especially since Israel’s genocide of Palestinians started: smiling, embracing, exhaling. I stayed up late and watched Mamdani’s victory speech, fully expecting myself to cry, but it was the photos I kept receiving all night of loved ones—in India, in East Africa and all across the US—that shattered me.

My former professor, the late June Jordan, used to tell us that if you want to bury something, if you want to hide, use abstract language and conceal your face.

Concealing a face is exactly what Bowdoin’s official Instagram account did not long after Mamdani won the election. In an Instagram post that had the finesse of AI slop, Bowdoin used a stock image of New York City, yellow cabs and all, with a giant white “B” on a bus stop. It had no photo of the famously photogenic or, to use the technical term, “Mashallah hot,” mayor-elect. The caption under it, in full, reads: “Zohran Mamdani ’14 has been elected the 111th mayor of New York City. Bowdoin has a long tradition of graduates who have pursued careers in public service, including mayors, governors, legislators, ambassadors and judges.”

Most posts on Bowdoin’s Instagram account draw a dozen comments at most. This received well over 600. Commenters—many of them students and alums of color—rightfully cooked Bowdoin for its comical own goal. One said that Bowdoin showed greater enthusiasm about the golf invitational than Mamdani making history as New York’s first South Asian, first Muslim and first African-born mayor. Others joked that in one post alone, Bowdoin had successfully managed to convince alums aged 22 to 30 to never donate to the College.

“This post feels like whispering under your breath,” one person commented.

Others said the quiet part out loud. Several pointed out that Reed Hastings—Bowdoin alum and donor—spent $250,000 to defeat Zohran Mamdani, according to Forbes. Many pointed out that Mamdani is an outspoken champion of Palestinian rights and founded the Students for Justice in Palestine group on campus, a group that remains unchartered.

What I saw in the comments was exhaustion. If you are a student of color at Bowdoin—or at any institution of learning—you know what it feels like for your face to be turned into a commodity. Show up to an Eid celebration or a Diwali party, and your image will likely be on the Bowdoin website and Instagram account—sometimes even long after you graduate. I have been that student. I know what it is like to be turned into a marketing device to promote admission and draw grants, and yet when people of color bring our joy and our hurt to the College, the institution just shrugs its shoulders or worse, puts up a lifeless Instagram post.

Take these crumbs. Aren’t you happy?

Bowdoin, to its credit, has somewhat course-corrected and put up another post with his picture and linked to an article on the College website. But consider Pomona College. It ran a piece about an alum—also a person of color—who ran for mayor of Albuquerque. It had quotes, a photo of him and his wife as undergraduates at Pomona and a moving story about how he wants to change the world. And it was published before the election. A post like that goes a long way in showing that alums, especially alums of color, matter. Bowdoin failed to do that.

When I interviewed Mamdani in May, I asked him if anyone had invited him to speak at Bowdoin. “I haven’t,” he told me, and then added, “But I would love to.”

He is that rare alum of color: someone who, even after I prodded him, has only positive stories from his time at Bowdoin and in Maine. And he is doing that thing the College says it wants its students and alums to do: fight for the common good. I haven’t been able to reach him or his people since his win, but I suspect he would be eager to visit Bowdoin again. But I am not sure, especially after Bowdoin’s Instagram posts—and the College’s continued blocking of a group he founded—if Bowdoin has given him any reason to return.

Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English and director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program.