As he runs for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has made his identity as a Muslim immigrant of 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.
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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.)
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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.
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Mr. Mamdani’s father was a professor at Columbia at the time his son applied to college and remains so now. Mr. Mamdani has said he never really wanted to go to a university where his father was a professor, and wound up attending Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies.
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Mr. Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Mira Nair, an acclaimed film director who grew up in India and later emigrated to the United States, and Mahmood Mamdani, then a college professor at Makerere University. Both his parents are of Indian descent, but his father’s family came to East Africa more than 100 years ago, Mr. Mamdani said.
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While Mr. Mamdani foregrounded economic issues during his campaign, he took pains to court voters of South Asian background. He released campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla, and occasionally appeared in a kurta, the long collarless shirt worn by South Asian men and women. On his official State Assembly web page, he touts his status as the first South Asian man and first Ugandan to serve in the New York State Assembly.
In campaign events with predominantly Black audiences, Mr. Mamdani has stressed his African roots and his father’s activism in the American civil rights movement when he was a student.
“I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa,” he said in June, during a speech at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s organization, the National Action Network. “I was given my middle name, Kwame, by my father, who named me after the first Prime Minister of Ghana. And decades ago in Uganda, we won our independence from the British in 1962.”
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On Thursday night, Mr. Adams characterized Mr. Mamdani’s actions as “an insult to every student who got into college the right way.”
“The African American identity is not a check-box of convenience,” he said in a statement. “It’s a history, a struggle and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive.”
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