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Zohran Mamdani, who said he doesn't identify as Black or African American, checked several races in college form
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, recently said that he does not identify as Black or African American
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, recently said that he does not identify as Black or African American. However, a New York Times report on Thursday revealed that the 33-year-old checked those particular races when he applied to Columbia University in 2009. The publication cited internal data derived from a hack of the college.
As per the NYT, the data revealed that when Mamdani was asked to identify his race on the application form, he checked a box that he was ‘Asian' but also ‘Black or African American’. The report further added that reporting his race could have given the NYC mayoral candidate, who was born in Uganda, an advantage.
The report has sparked controversy, especially since Mamdani on Thursday said that he does not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather ‘an American who was born in Africa’. Mamdani was not accepted in Columbia.
Explaining his choice, Zohran Mamdani told NYT: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background." He added that the application allowed students to provide specific information, where he wrote ‘Ugandan’.
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he said.
Mamdani is not publicly spoken about identifying as African American or Black. During his campaign against Andrew Cuomo, he spoke about his Muslim and South Asian ancestry. The 33-year-old now faces a general election playing field that includes Mayor Eric Adams.
“As the first South Asian elected official, the first Muslim elected official to ever run for mayor, the turnout in those same communities has been incredible to see,” Mamdani told NPR this week.
Zohran Mamdani’s father was a professor at Columbia at the time he applied to college. The mayoral candidate attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies.
