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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/nyregion/mamdani-columbia-black-application.html
Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application
Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat running for mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda. He doesn’t consider himself Black but said the application didn’t allow for the complexity of his background.Listen to this article · 8:24 min Learn more
Zohran Mamdani said the college applications were the only instances that he could recall where he identified himself as Black or African American.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
By Benjamin Ryan, Nicholas Fandos and Dana Rubinstein
July 3, 2025, 5:31 p.m. ET
As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrantof South Asian descent a key part of his appeal.
But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. 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.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” said Mr. Mamdani, a state lawmaker from Queens.
The application allowed students to provide “more specific information where relevant,” and Mr. Mamdani said that he wrote in, “Ugandan.”
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he added.
While neither Mr. Mamdani nor Columbia University could provide the template for the application form the college used at that time, a copy of it was archivedonline. Mr. Mamdani said he filled out all of his college applications in the same way.
The Times could not find any speeches or interviews in which Mr. Mamdani referred to himself as Black or African American, and Mr. Mamdani said the college applications were the only instances where he could recall describing himself as such.
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Mr. Mamdani acknowledged that he checked the boxes for Asian and Black or African American, and then said he wrote in “Ugandan.”
In his meteoric rise, Mr. Mamdani has proactively embraced his Muslim and South Asian ancestry in his pitch to New Yorkers. On Tuesday, The Associated Press declared Mr. Mamdani the decisive winner of the Democratic primary for mayor. He now faces a general election playing field that includes Mayor Eric Adams, who is Black.
“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,” Mr. Mamdani said this week in an interviewwith NPR.
Last month’s cyberattack appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023.
This is why lineage matters
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