“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”