NEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Zohran Mamdani, the socialist Democrat nominee for Mayor of New York City, is being criticized for responses he made on his application to Columbia University, The New York Times has reported.
Mamdani shocked much of the country when he defeated disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic mayoral nomination on June 24 given his radical background, which includes adopting the Marxist battle cry of “seizing the means of production” and advocating for government-run grocery stores, among other left-wing causes. His win has been taken as a sign of just how extreme the Big Apple’s Democrats appear to have become, prompting speculation whether a Republican could win the reliably blue city in the upcoming election.
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On July 3, the Times published a story revealing that, on his 2009 Columbia application, Mamdani “checked a box that he was ‘Asian’ but also ‘Black or African American,’ according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University.”
Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is a Muslim of South Asian descent, has never publicly identified as black or African-American, though he was born in Uganda, which is located in Africa, and lived there until he was around five-years-old, at which point his parents moved to Cape Town, South Africa.
Under the affirmative action policies of the time, applying as black would have given his application added weight, though he ultimately was not accepted (despite his father being a faculty member).
“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 attempted to explain in an interview with the Times. “Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.”
A liberal paper covering a negative story about a progressive politician did not sit well with left-wing activists or all Times staffers for that matter. Website Semafor reports that inside sources told it that the Times “believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo,” which the paper has neither confirmed nor denied.
Writing on his Substack, Rufo speculated that Mamdani may have felt the need seek a racial advantage on his resume because he “scored a 2140 out of 2400 on the SAT, placing him in the 89th percentile,” well below the overall median and Asian median for Columbia student, but above the black median. Rufo also theorized that lying on the application could have actually doomed his chances, given that information about his parents made it easy to determine he was neither black nor underprivileged.
New York City’s mayoral election will be held November 4. Mamdani runs against scandal-plagued incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who withdrew from the Democrat primary to run as an independent, as well as radio personality and anti-crime activist Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.
