The disclosure on Thursday that Zohran Mamdani identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” as a high school senior applying to college has provoked sharply different reactions.
Three of his rivals in New York City’s mayoral race have strongly criticized Mr. Mamdani, with two suggesting potential fraud and calling for further investigation.
Right-wing pundits have flocked to social media to call Mr. Mamdani a liar — and worse.
And his supporters have rallied to his defense, angrily characterizing the disclosure as a politically motivated hit job with no bearing on the mayor’s race, one advanced by a right-wing academic who has promoted eugenic views.
The varied responses followed Mr. Mamdani’s acknowledgment on Thursday that he had “checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background” while filling out an application to Columbia University in 2009. He said he had not been trying to gain an edge through Columbia’s race-conscious affirmative action admissions program — and, indeed, he was not accepted to the school.
The New York Times could find no speeches or interviews in which Mr. Mamdani referred to himself as Black or African American, and he said in an interview that applications to Columbia and other colleges were the only instances when he could recall describing himself as such.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who endorsed Mr. Mamdani’s chief rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in the primary, said that he believed that, “within reason, we should all be the arbiters of our own identity.”
“I have had political opponents question the authenticity of Afro-Latino identity, and question my blackness,” he said. “And I deeply, deeply resent it. It makes my blood boil.”
Mr. Torres, who has written about the contours of race and ethnicity in U.S. politics, added that he believed that “the game of questioning identity can be a sordid business and should be avoided. Elections should be about ideas, not identities.”
Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens, has made his identity as a Ugandan-born, Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent a key part of his candidacy.
He easily won a crowded Democratic primary, defeating Mr. Cuomo, his closest competitor, by 12 percentage points. But 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 the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, is trying to rebuild going into the general election in November.
Mr. Adams, who is running as an independent, mocked Mr. Mamdani on social media, posting a cartoon depicting Mr. Mamdani having checked two boxes.
Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for the Adams campaign, said that Mr. Mamdani had “misrepresented his racial identity to gain admission to Columbia University,” adding: “This is not just dishonest — it’s possibly fraudulent. It may have taken a place away from a qualified African American applicant and misused a process designed to correct real, systemic inequities.”
The Adams campaign called on Columbia to release all relevant admissions records and to “conduct a full internal review.”
Mr. Cuomo’s campaign said that Mr. Mamdani’s Columbia application raised questions as to whether he was hiding other information.
“Mamdani, his proposals, his funding, and his background received absolutely no scrutiny from the press,” said Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign. “This issue must be fully investigated, because, if true, it could be fraud and just the tip of the iceberg.”
Jim Walden, a prominent and well-regarded lawyer who is running for mayor of New York City as an independent, echoed the Cuomo campaign, asserting that Mr. Mamdani was “the most poorly vetted candidate in history.”
The only mayoral rival to downplay the revelation was Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit crime prevention organization, who is running as a Republican.
“We could split hairs on why he put in that he was an African American,” Mr. Sliwa said in an interview on Friday. “But we are spending so much focus on the wrong things about Zohran. How about we stay focused on the issues?”
Mr. Mamdani’s answers on the Columbia application were included in data obtained through an internal data hack of Columbia University that was shared with The Times, and then confirmed by Mr. Mamdani. The cyberattack was apparently carried out by an opponent of affirmative action, who was attempting to determine if Columbia was still using race-conscious policies after the Supreme Court effectively banned the practice in 2023.
Some of Mr. Mamdani’s allies, as well as various critics on social media, raised questions about the legitimacy of the disclosure, given the political motivations of those who first uncovered and shared it.
Assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest, a Brooklyn Democrat who, like Mr. Mamdani, is a democratic socialist, posted on X that “no one cares about his college applications.”
Reached by email, Ms. Forrest added: “The voters of this city care about affordability, they are concerned with rising fascism, and they deserve unbiased coverage of the serious issues facing our city. I look forward to a full accounting of the editorial decisions that shaped this story, as well as an explanation for why The Times believed this article was newsworthy.”
In a statement on Friday, The Times offered more insight into its journalists’ approach to a story that it maintained had news value.
“Our reporters obtained information about Mr. Mamdani’s Columbia college application and went to the Mamdani campaign with it,” said Patrick Healy, a Times assistant managing editor for standards and trust. “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed the information in an interview with The Times.”
He continued: “Mr. Mamdani shared his thinking about the limitations of identity-related boxes on application forms like Columbia’s, and how he wrote in ‘Uganda,’ the country of his birth, to explain why he checked the box — a decision many people with overlapping identities have wrestled with when they have been confronted with such form requests. Mr. Mamdani’s thinking and decision-making were newsworthy and in line with our mission to help readers better know and understand top candidates.”
Some of the discussions on social media reflected the complex nature of Mr. Mamdani’s response as a college applicant.
There were hundreds of conversations about identity, race, colonization and Islamophobia. Many people with Southeast Asian heritage who were born in African countries spoke of that specific legacy, and some delved into the history of the British Empire using Indian laborers to build the Uganda Railway. Others accused Mr. Mamdani of attempting to deceive the Columbia admissions board and trying to “game the system.”
Some people lightheartedly questioned how Mr. Mamdani could have been rejected by Columbia, despite being a Bronx Science graduate and the son of a Columbia professor.
Others brushed off the entire issue, deeming it “extremely trivial.” One post on X, which was reposted by Julia Salazar, a New York State senator who is, like Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, stated: “As a Black American woman born in Africa, I absolve him. NEXT.”
Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.
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