There are a lot of questions worth asking about the New York Times’s report on Thursday about New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The most obvious is how Mamdani’s racial self-identification in his 2009 application to Columbia University — the university where his father was a tenured professor — has any bearing on his current candidacy. Another is whether the Times should have granted anonymity to the source of the story, a man described by the Guardian as a “proponent of eugenics.” Yet another is whether the news value of the story outweighed its provenance: a hack of personal information from the university by a politically motivated hacker.
"...
he was
being asked to distill who he was into ill-fitting compartments." [This is why I usually decline to specify my "race" unless it is medically relevant.]
The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application
America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic.
July 7, 2025 The Washington Post
But there is nonetheless value to the story: It offers an excellent distillation of the narrow and archaic way Americans evaluate race — both personally and institutionally.
Mamdani’s family is South Asian but lived in Uganda for decades. His father wrote an essay for the London Review of Books in 2022 describing the family’s expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin and how so many natives of India had come to that African nation in the first place. Mamdani was born in Uganda but had moved to New York City by the time he was seven.
When applying for admission to his father’s employer in 2009, Mamdani was presented with an optional question about his race. According to the Times, he checked “Black or African American” and “Asian” and then, in the following “Additional Optional Information” section, specified that he was “Ugandan.” The racial categories included in the Columbia application were constrained to those tracked by the federal government; there was no “Indian” or “South Asian” category, for example.
“Even though these boxes are constraining,” Mamdani told the Times, “I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.”
This is the central issue. It wasn’t that Mamdani views himself as Black (the Times found no evidence that he’s ever presented himself as such outside of the context of a college application). It was that he was being asked to distill who he was into ill-fitting compartments.
He is not alone. The federal census has tracked racial identity since the nation was founded, albeit not always directly. That’s meant the slow addition of different categories of identity — and increasing recognition that even those categories were insufficient.
For the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau introduced a new process for collecting and recording information submitted by U.S. residents. One change, for example, did nothing more than increase the number of characters stored when people opted to write out their family backgrounds. As a result of these changes, the number of U.S. residents who described themselves as “White and some other race” soared — increasing from 9 million to nearly 34 million people between 2010 and 2020. This wasn’t because the country had become dramatically more diverse. It was in large part because the country’s residents suddenly had a less constraining way to describe themselves on the rare occasion they were asked to do so.
For many White Americans, this sort of calculus is foreign. You see a form that asks race; you check “White.” There’s rarely need to consider race and racial identity because it’s rare that such forms are presented and almost unheard of for White racial identity to become an acute element of day-to-day life.
“To be white in America is not to have to think about it,” R.W. Terry wrote in 1981. “Except for hardcore racial supremacists, the meaning of being white is having the choice of attending to or ignoring one’s own whiteness.”
This small element of privilege is waved away as “woke” in the moment, but privilege it is. We are in a moment in which a subset of the White majority in America has decided that it is put-upon and a target of discrimination instead of the beneficiary of that imbalance. This is why the Mamdani story was cobbled together in the first place: as purported evidence that Mamdani understood that presenting himself as Black might smooth his path toward admission at Columbia. (That the right spent years arguing that Mamdani’s other self-description — Asian — was seen as detrimental to such efforts has not generated much discussion.)
Race in America is often presented in two buckets: White and non-White. This is an update to the buckets that existed for much of American history — White and Black — reflecting how the end of immigration restrictions in the 1960s allowed more Asian and Hispanic and Middle Eastern and you-name-it people to come to the U.S. But there are still two buckets, buckets into which people with mixed racial backgrounds jump (or are dropped) depending on circumstance.
Sociologist Richard Alba looked at birth records for the year 2017, finding that most mixed-race babies that year had one White parent.
“These babies are in between: they are both white and minority, with family roots on both sides of a still salient societal divide,” Alba wrote in his book “The Great Demographic Illusion.” “In this respect, the idea that U.S. babies are now mostly minority is an illusion fostered by arbitrary classification decisions.”
This makes a political difference. Research from 2018 by sociologists Dowell Myers and Morris Levy presented Americans with news stories about increased demographic diversity, presenting those stories through three lenses: as a basic description of increased diversity, by explaining that a White majority would endure including mixed-race Whites or by describing Whites becoming a racial minority.
The third frame was viewed most negatively by Whites — particularly by White Republicans — even though the second was a more accurate depiction of American society.
It’s also worth noting, in the context of the Mamdani story, one of the most illuminating bits of research I’ve ever encountered. In the 1989 Latino National Political Survey, respondents of Puerto Rican, Mexican or Cuban ancestry were asked to identify their own race as interviewers recorded their own observations about the respondents’ skin color. Even among those with the darkest observed skin, “White” was a more common response than “Black.”
How individuals view race and how they are viewed by others can and do diverge dramatically. That’s particularly true because American racial constructs are not global, even though Americans often assume that they are. (They aren’t even consistent over time.)
Such assumptions often derive from the sort of racial policing that’s at the heart of the Times story about Mamdani. How could an American from Africa claim to be “Black or African American”? Does this constitute “fraud,” as asserted by a spokesman for former governor Andrew Cuomo, who Mamdani beat in the city’s Democratic primary? Or is it instead a combination of a pervasive unsophisticated understanding of racial identity with opportunism among those seeking to use race as a political cudgel?