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.”
“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 archived online. 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.
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 interview with 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.
While Mr. Mamdani was not a target of the hack, the information about him was included in a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action. The Times agreed to withhold his real name.
It included information on applicants’ citizenship status, national origin, standardized test scores, race and whether they were ultimately admitted to the school, among other factors. It did not include a PDF or image of Mr. Mamdani’s full application. Columbia, which is still investigating the incident, has not validated the information derived from the hack and declined to comment for this article.
The Times tested the data by successfully cross-referencing a dozen Columbia alumni, from classes 1989 to 2014, based on their middle names and birthdays, and Mr. Mamdani did not dispute the veracity of the information about his application.
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.
Mr. Mamdani’s self-identification as both Black or African American and Asian on his application points to the heterogeneity of his background and upbringing as the child of Indian Ugandan and Indian American parents who brought him up in Uganda, South Africa and New York City.
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.
When asked if any of his family had intermarried while in East Africa, he said in the interview on Thursday, “They’re all of Indian origin, from Gujarat.”
His family moved to New York City around the time Mahmood Mamdani joined the Columbia faculty in 1999. At the time of the move, Mr. Mamdani was 7. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018 and is now a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda.
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.”
During the primary, Mr. Mamdani struggled to make inroads with Black voters, with Mr. Cuomo carrying majority Black neighborhoods in the first round of voting by 18 points. Black voters represent an essential part of the coalition that Mr. Adams is trying to rebuild going into the November general election.
After Mr. Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, he continued to grapple with the issue of racial identity, successfully cosponsoring legislation requiring that when the state collects demographic data, it include categories for New Yorkers of Middle Eastern and North African descent.
“The inability of these boxes to reflect the breadth of New Yorkers’ lives and their backgrounds is something that has also influenced my legislative work and my advocacy,” he said in the interview.
Right-wing Republicans, including President Trump, have seized on Mr. Mamdani’s Muslim faith and immigrant history to smear and attack him and in some cases call for his deportation. This week, Mr. Trump repeated a baseless claim that the New York Democrat had immigrated illegally to the United States and threatened to arrest him if he impeded immigration agents pursuing other targets in New York City.
During a rally on Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, said Mr. Trump was merely seeking to stoke the “flames of division.”
“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,” he said.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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