In America, race is not just a description of skin colour. It is a narrative slot, a ticket to visibility, legitimacy, or silent exclusion. For Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, the choice he made on his Columbia University application in 2009 now sits unearthed and scrutinised: he ticked the boxes for both “Asian” and “Black or African American.”Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani does not identify as Black. When asked this week why he selected those categories, he said: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.”On the surface, it sounds like an act of calculated advantage-seeking. After all, Columbia, like most elite universities then, ran race-conscious admissions. Identifying as Black might have increased his chances in a system designed to redress centuries of racial exclusion. Critics, including Mayor Eric Adams, quickly pounced, calling it “an insult to every student who got into college the right way.”But the reality is more layered—and reveals how rigid, colonial-era categories continue to shape lives in ways that rarely match lived complexity.Indian but not Indian-AmericanMamdani is ethnically Indian, born to a Gujarati family whose ancestors migrated to East Africa over a century ago. His mother, Mira Nair, is a globally acclaimed filmmaker. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a leading postcolonial scholar. But in East Africa, Indians were neither fully African nor entirely Indian in identity. Under British colonialism, they were categorised as “Asiatics” and kept apart from both white settlers and native Africans. In Uganda, many thrived in trade and professions but remained perpetual outsiders—a status violently reinforced by Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of Asians.For Indian-Ugandans like Mamdani, identity has always been ambiguous: African by birth, Indian by ethnicity, but citizens of neither. When his family moved to New York in 1999, American forms forced a new set of boxes upon him. The Asian tick-box includes Indians, but rarely captures the distinct history of Indians in Africa. The African American box, meanwhile, is designed for descendants of the transatlantic slave trade and the Black American experience.
The hierarchy of racial categories
Why, then, did he choose African American alongside Asian? Because in America, Blackness is recognised as a political identity born of struggle and oppression. Indian-American identity, by contrast, is often invisible—treated as an immigrant economic niche rather than a racial group needing justice. This is why even Kamala Harris, with a Tamil mother, emphasised her Black identity throughout her rise. The road to power in the US runs smoother through narratives of African American struggle than through the unrelatable caste-linguistic divisions of South Asia.Harris never denied her Indian heritage, but in political messaging, her mother’s dosa recipes were a footnote to her identity as a Black woman, a Howard alum, a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. To many Indian Americans, this choice felt strategic—because American categories do not accommodate multiple truths.
The dilemma of tick-box identities
For Mamdani, ticking African American was not an attempt to claim a heritage of slavery or Jim Crow. It was an attempt to signal: “I was born in Africa.” But these boxes don’t ask about birthplace; they ask about race. “Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he said. He also wrote in “Ugandan” under the form’s open-ended section. But forms don’t read nuance.The hack that revealed his application data showed no speeches or interviews where Mamdani ever called himself Black or African American. Indeed, his political identity today is rooted in his South Asian Muslim heritage. He campaigns in Urdu and Bangla, wears kurtas to rallies, and celebrates being the first South Asian man and Ugandan-born person in the New York State Assembly. Yet at African American gatherings, he references his African birthplace, Uganda’s independence, and his middle name Kwame, after Ghana’s first Prime Minister.It is a delicate tightrope. Identify as Black, and risk charges of opportunism. Identify as Indian, and remain a model minority forever foreign to the American political mainstream. Identify as both, and accusations of identity manipulation follow.
Colonial categories in modern America
The deeper problem is that these boxes themselves are relics of imperial racial classification systems. British colonial governments divided populations into neat ethno-racial columns to control them; the US census and college applications inherited this logic. They leave no space for Indian-Ugandans, Indo-Caribbeans, or Tamil Malaysians—global citizens whose identities transcend national borders.For Mamdani, none of it worked anyway. Columbia rejected him. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine and majored in Africana studies. Today, as he challenges Mayor Eric Adams, who is Black, his identification as African American on that teenage application is now political ammunition.But perhaps his teenage choice was less about gaming the system and more about how the system forces you to game yourself: to slice your heritage into boxes acceptable to bureaucrats who will never understand why you don’t fit.And yet, despite ticking both boxes, Columbia rejected him.That is the lesson no one is talking about: racial categories promise advantage, but ultimately, they remain designed to keep out those who don’t fit neatly within them. Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine and majored in Africana studies. Today, as he challenges Mayor Eric Adams, who is Black, his teenage application choices are political ammunition.Ultimately, Mamdani’s saga is not about affirmative action cheating or woke posturing. It is about the impossibility of conveying ancestral history, racial experience, birthplace, migration, expulsion, diaspora, and faith into two or three colonial tick-boxes.He remains an Indian, an African, a Muslim, and an American—all identities that refuse to fit neatly on a Common App form. The tragedy is that he, like so many children of empire, had to choose at all—and that even choosing everything was not enough.
