New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified as both “Black or African American” and “Asian” on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to leaked data from a massive Columbia admissions breach. The revelation raises fresh questions about identity politics and racial self-identification in elite college admissions.
Mamdani, a South Asian socialist identitarian born in Uganda to Indian parents, admitted to The New York Times that he marked both categories in an effort to reflect what he called his “complex background.” The data, part of a 460GB leak of student records from Columbia University, was verified by Bloomberg and later reviewed by the Times.
His father, a longtime professor at Columbia, and his mother, Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, have long emphasized his South Asian identity. Nair described him in 2013 as “a total desi,” using a term for people of South Asian origin. “He is not an Uhmericcan at all,” she added.
Despite checking the boxes for “Black” and “Asian,” Mamdani was not accepted to Columbia. He instead attended Bowdoin College in Maine. He claims he never intended to gain an advantage in the admissions process and only selected those identities because applications lacked options for people of Indian-Ugandan descent.
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans,” Mamdani told the Times. “I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.”
While Mamdani’s admissions forms predated the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that banned race-based college admissions, Columbia University actively used race as a determining factor at the time. He now describes himself as “an American who was born in Africa.”
Mamdani is running against Democrat incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a black New Yorker, in the general election. His campaign has leaned heavily on his South Asian identity and pro-Palestinian positions.
