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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.
July 3, 2025Updated 5:58 p.m. ET
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.
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.”
