Crémieux reveals Mamdani applied to college as "Black or African American"

White American men almost never try to get affirmative action quota spots set aside for blacks. But South Asians?

Checked “Black or African American” on college applications

From the New York Times news section:

Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application

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.

By Benjamin Ryan, Nicholas Fandos, and Dana Rubinstein

July 3, 2025

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.

Just like Elon Musk would be “Black or African American,” right, Zohran?

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.)

His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia. Prof. Mamdani looks a little like Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

A faculty nepo-baby and an African-American … and he still didn’t get in! (He had to go to frigid Bowdoin.)

“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. …

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.

Well, New York Times, is Columbia obeying the Supreme Court?

… 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.

In the United States, it’s pretty common for white female academics such as Senator Elizabeth Warren to pretend to be American Indian or Hispanic, although it takes Rachel Dolezal-sized courage to pretend to be black.

White men almost never pretend to be black for the affirmative action benefits. The last big scandal was the Malone Brothers, Boston firemen in the 1970s. As I wrote in my review in Taki’s Magazine of David E. Bernstein’s book on race categories Classified:

In America, race classifications work largely on a self-identification honor system: You check the box or boxes that you want to represent you.

But be aware, if you are too blatantly fraudulent, you can get caught, especially if you left a paper trail of previously checking the accursed white box.

The most famous case is the Malone twins, Paul and Philip, who initially applied as whites to be Boston firemen. But they weren’t bright enough to reach the minimum test score for white applicants. Yet they were clever enough to retake the exam as blacks and perform well enough to be affirmative-action hires.

But they weren’t smart enough to get their stories straight when finally challenged a decade later:

[Captain Stapleton] questioned each brother individually about their identity. Paul told Stapleton that his father was black; Philip reported that someone in his family was black, but he did not remember who.

They were fired.

The scandal led to a citywide effort to purge all the white phonies who must be passing themselves off as nonwhites in Boston government jobs. But few additional white hoaxers were found, and investigations wound up focusing on puzzling edge cases.

In truth, the American race classification apparatus manages to clank along as well as it does because most white people are strikingly honest about not cheating in matters of race. Of course, nobody, including Bernstein, notices that because we aren’t conditioned to be aware of patterns of whites behaving well.

In contrast, Mamdani is the second South Asian male notorious for claiming to be black on an academic application. The first was actress Mindy Kaling’s brother.