Zohran Mamdani marked Asian and African American on college application: Report

Democratic socialist and New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani identified himself as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his Columbia University application in 2009, according to a report by The New York Times.

The 33-year-old applied to the Ivy League university as a high school senior but was not accepted. The information came to light through internal data obtained from a hack of Columbia’s admissions system.

Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and raised in the US’s Queens, defended the decision, saying he was trying to reflect his mixed background due to limited options in the form. His mother is the award-winning Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair.

“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” the Queens lawmaker told the NYT.

He also emphasised that the form allowed students to provide more specific information, and that he wrote in “Ugandan” to better represent his heritage.

Mamdani said he does not consider himself Black or African American, but “an American who was born in Africa”. The NYT report further said that he does not appear to have ever publicly described himself as Black outside the college applications.

At the time of his application, the Democratic mayoral candidate’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, was a professor at Columbia University, a position he still holds. Despite the connection, the 33-year-old said he had no strong desire to attend a school where his father worked, and ultimately enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies.

The data from the Columbia hack, shared with the Times by an anonymous intermediary, revealed that Mamdani’s racial identification could have potentially given him an edge under Columbia’s race-conscious admissions policy, which was still in place in 2009.

Though Mamdani has embraced his South Asian and Muslim identity during his campaign, releasing videos in Urdu and Bengali and wearing traditional kurtas, he has also drawn on his African roots, referencing his Ugandan birthplace and his father’s civil rights activism.

In a recent appearance at the National Action Network, he noted that his middle name, “Kwame”, was given in honour of Ghana’s first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah.

Following his 2020 election to the State Assembly, Mamdani also supported legislation to include Middle Eastern and North African categories in state demographic data collection.

The leaked Columbia data does not include a copy of his full application but contains race, test scores, citizenship status, and admission outcomes. Columbia has not confirmed the data’s accuracy, though the NYT verified a sample of records, and Mamdani did not dispute the information.

As Mamdani heads into the general election against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, scrutiny of his past, including how he identifies racially, has intensified.

The 33-year-old has been at loggerheads with US President Donald Trump following the latter’s deportation threat. Mamdani has accused Trump of using fear and division as political tools, while asserting that it won’t impact him.

“If this is what Donald Trump and his administration feel comfortable saying about the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, imagine what they feel comfortable saying and doing about immigrants whose names they don’t even know,” Mamdani said during a rally.

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