New York City

Colleges Created a Diversity Box-Ticking Game—Zohran Mamdani Just Played It

The big problem here is the elite racism of college admissions departments, not the mayoral candidate's creative box-checking.

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Zohran Mamdani | Lev Radin/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
Zohran Mamdani (Lev Radin/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party's newly minted candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, found himself in some hot water last week after The New York Times reported that he claimed to be both "Asian" and "Black or African American" on his college application to Columbia University in 2009.

Mamdani holds U.S. citizenship, but was born in Uganda to Indian parents. He is African, and he is American, but he is definitely not black, which is what the term "African American" implies.

The news prompted criticism of Mamdani from some black New Yorkers, including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is actually black, and who is running for re-election as an independent. "The African American identity is not a checkbox of convenience," he declared in a statement. "It's a history, a struggle and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive."

By personal gain, Adams means Columbia University's race-conscious admissions policies, which awarded preferential treatment to certain applicants on the basis of race. Or, in plain English, the university discriminated in favor of prospective students who were black, Hispanic, or Native American. Checking the "Black or African American" box would have earned Mamdani extra points toward admission at the time. (Mamdani ultimately failed to gain admission.)

Mamdani told the Times that his options were suboptimal and that he subsequently wrote in "Ugandan" to add clarity.

"Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was," said Mamdani.

Conservatives have widely shared this story on social media as an indictment of the democratic socialist candidate's character. Many Democrats, on the other hand, think it's a giant nothingburger and were cross with the Times for bringing it up in the first place. (Being annoyed with The New York Times' occasional attempts at evenhandedness is now an important component of the liberal identity.) Former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, observed on X that Uganda is in Africa—fact check: true—so it's case closed.

Democrats who are tempted to align themselves with de Blasio's thinking might want to consider the following thought experiment: Let's say the government gave special consideration on the basis of race when awarding federal contracts, and a white man from South Africa checked a box claiming to be "Black or African American." We can even give our made-up aspiring federal contractor a name: Elon Musk.

I suspect Democrats would not say this was a non-story, even though South Africa is indeed a country in Africa. (It's even got Africa in the name.)

All that said: Yes, this story is something of a nothingburger as far as Mamdani is concerned. I don't really blame him for getting creative in order to (imperfectly) capture the nuances of a complicated ethnic background. But I'd add that ethnic backgrounds are usually somewhat complicated. Identities have a habit of defying easy labeling, which is precisely why the project of using broad racial categorization to assign merit is fraught and inadvisable.

There are two groups of people who obsess over race as a category: old-school racists, and college admissions departments. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at colleges that incentivize applicants to be misleading about their skin pigmentation because false value is assigned to it—a practice that majorities of American voters and the Supreme Court wisely hold in disdain.

As for Mamdani, there's plenty else to dislike about his candidacy.