The African question: Who's what?

My daughter's friend told her he was checking the "African American" box on his college applications, since his father is an immigrant from Africa.

Technically, that's correct. His father was born and raised in South Africa. He's white.

"No!," she said. "No, no, no."

"Don't worry," he replied. "I'm not that stupid."

Zohran Mamdani

Thanks to a hacker hostile to affirmative action, we know that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, marked himself as "Black or African American" as well as "Asian" on his application to Columbia University in 2009.

He's arguably "African American." Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of Indian origin: Dad is Muslim, Mom is Hindu. He lived in South Africa from the age of five to seven, before his family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His mother is an award-winning movie director, his father a professor of anthropology at Columbia.

Mamdani, 33, told the New York Times that he marked both boxes on all his college applications to represent his complex background. Apparently, he was rejected by Columbia, despite the preference usually given to professors' children. He ended up at Bowdoin.

Mayor Eric Adams, who is black, is running as an independent. He called Mamdani's box checking “an insult to every student who got into college the right way.” In a statement, Adams added,

“The African American identity is not a check-box of convenience. It's a history, a struggle and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive.”

Mamdani's backers are furious at the Times for reporting the story. They fear resentment against affirmative action -- which is very strong -- will hurt their candidate in the general election.

"Eric Adams is now the great white hope," tweets Wilfred Reilly.

Also see this from Jimmy Gandhi:

Writing in The Spectator, Peter Wood of the conservative National Association of Scholars provides background on Mamdani's family history and culture.

His father, Mahmood Mamdani, grew up in the Indian community of Uganda, which dominated the country's commercial sector, despite its small size. In 1972, dictator Idi Amin expelled the Indian population, including Mahmood, then 26. Indians returned after Amin's fall in 1979, and once again prospered. Mahmood returned, became involved in politics and was stripped of his citizenship in 1984, then had it restored by a new Ugandan government.

"Zohran was born into a relatively prosperous and privileged class in Uganda that owed its success partly to its own marketplace initiative and partly to advantages that the British Empire conferred on it," Wood writes. "But it was a precarious kind of privilege that could be snatched away at any moment depending on the whims of those holding political power."

Born in 1991, Zohran was given the middle name “Kwame” in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the one-time “president for life” of Ghana known for "his revolutionary rants and his fierce anti-colonialism," writes Wood. He also wrecked the economy.

He attended an expensive private school known for being progressive, Wood writes. He went on to the elite Bronx High School of Science, which requires a high score on an admissions test. Mamdani now wants to end test-based admissions.

Mahmood, a prolific scholar, has focused his career on "the legacy of late colonialism," notes Wood. Despite the ambiguous status of Asians in Africa, both parents are fiercely anti-Israel, which they see as a "settler-colonialist" state.

At college Mamdani co-founded Bowdoin’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and majored in Africana Studies.

As it happens, Wood worked on a study called What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students that was published in April 2013, when Mamdani was a student.  

Bowdoin was not a place to debate ideas, he writes. It had become "a seminary of sorts for those drawn to the increasingly radicalized progressive worldview."