Last week we learned that Zohran Mamdani checked the box for “Black or African American” on his application to Columbia University. The evidence of that was found in a hack of Columbia’s files.
Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.
Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.
Mamdani’s other applications (he wasn’t accepted at Columbia) haven’t been revealed but he admitted he filled all of them out the same way. His excuse was that he was trying to “capture the fullness of my background.” Though he was born in Africa and lived there until he was seven, the box for race is clearly intended to refer to black Americans. And Mamdani, whose parents were Indian, would have known that. He also would have known that checking the box for black would given him an unearned advantage.
The initial story, which the NY Times apparently published in order to avoid being scooped by Chris Rufo, was followed by another one which noted the controversy and ended with an absolution.
The disclosure on Thursday that Zohran Mamdani identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” as a high school senior applying to college has provoked sharply different reactions.
Three of his rivals in New York City’s mayoral race have strongly criticized Mr. Mamdani, with two suggesting potential fraud and calling for further investigation.
Right-wing pundits have flocked to social media to call Mr. Mamdani a liar — and worse…
Others brushed off the entire issue, deeming it “extremely trivial.” One post on X, which was reposted by Julia Salazar, a New York State senator who is, like Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, stated: “As a Black American woman born in Africa, I absolve him. NEXT.”
Today, the Times is back with another story up about this which also seems designed to let Mamdani off the hook. It’s titled “How Do You Self-Identify? For Many Americans, Checking a Box Won’t Do.” The gist of the story is that lots of people feel their background is hard to simplify.
Mr. Mamdani’s approach to identity boxes reflects experiences and decisions that have exasperated people across the country, according to many Americans who shared their stories in interviews and in replies to an online questionnaire from The New York Times that drew hundreds of responses…
Greg Bartkus, 60, who works in the film industry in Southern California, said ethnic categories had flummoxed him since his childhood. Raised in Michigan by a Lithuanian American father and a Mexican American mother, he said, he did not identify as Hispanic until he applied for college, on the advice of a consultant at a college fair.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “Until I moved to L.A., I didn’t know what the Day of the Dead was. My wife would just roll her eyes when I tried to order in a Mexican restaurant.” In the Midwest in the 1980s, he said, he was told he had minority status, but in California in 2025, “I’m just another 50-50 guy, nothing unique.”
I have no doubt the motivation behind this entire story was to give cover to Mamdani for some kind of bureaucratic blackface, but it’s interesting that even the people who don’t necessarily see themselves as minorities were pushed that direction by college applications. Maybe the best defense here isn’t that Mamdani was trying to accurate represent his identity, which strikes me as self-serving BS. The best you can say is that he was trying to game the system like everyone else.
“My guess is he was gaming the system, but everybody’s gaming the system,” said John Kontrabecki, 73, a white lawyer in San Francisco with one child in high school and another in college.
“I’m a liberal Democrat,” he said. “I voted for Biden. I voted for Pelosi. But there are some things that Trump has called out that are accurate. We have created a system that’s easily manipulated by people to the disadvantage of people who are playing it straight.”
This is the America that affirmative action created. Two years ago the Times published a much better opinion piece by someone who spent his summers helping students with their college essays. He quickly learned that everyone was gaming the system.
Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school.
Nothing Mamdani could say would make me like his politics, but I’d have more respect for him as a person if he could stop lying about reflecting his identity and just admit he was working the system as a 19 year old. But he probably won’t admit that. He’ll just keep lying and the NY Times will keep doing its best to get him off the hook.
