Mamdani, who was born to parents of Indian descent in Uganda, said he checked the box because the identity boxes on the application weren't enough to show the breadth and scope of his ethnic and racial composition.
He admitted to the Times that as a high school senior in 2009, he filled out all his forms the same way, including on his application to Columbia University, where his father taught then and is still on the faculty. The data hack was an effort to discover if Columbia still uses a race-based admissions program as they did at the time Mamdani was considering the school.
His Hollywood film director mother Mira Nair has said her son is "a total desi," a term for South Asians. "He is a total desi," she said in 2013, "We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian."
On Thursday, he told the Times that he doesn't consider himself to be either of the things he checked off on that application back in 2009, instead saying he considers himself to be "an American who was born in Africa." He came to the US with his parents when he was 7-years-old and became a naturalized citizen when he was 27 years old in 2018. He is now 33-years-old and considers himself to be a dual citizen of both Uganda and the United States.
"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," the Times reports of his intentions, noting that he wasn't accepted to the Ivy League school. He also said he didn't want to go to a school where his father was a professor anyway.
"Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background," Mamdani said. He wrote in "Ugandan" where he was able, and said that the identity boxes used by colleges "are constraining."
"I wanted my college application to reflect who I was," he said. Mamdani further told the Times that it was only on his college applications that he identified as "Black or African American."
Columbia University actively used identity data to make their determinations for admissions. They are no longer legally permitted to do so after a Supreme Court ruling found that it a was discriminatory and racist practice. Mamdani attended Maine's Bowdoin and prior to that was a graduate of Bronx Science, where he ran for student office on a platform of free juice. He lost.
He's used his South Asian identity widely in his New York City mayoral campaign and said he got into politics in part due to the fight in the Middle East of Palestinians against Israel. In the general election, he'll be running against the incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is a black man from Brooklyn.
