OAN Staff Blake Wolf
4:03 PM – Friday, July 4, 2025

Democrat NYC mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a self described Democrat socialist, identified himself as Asian and African American on his Columbia University application in 2009.

33-year-old Mamdani, a Muslim immigrant, argued that he checked both boxes to “reflect” his identity rather than an attempt to gain an advantage in the admissions process.

“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 stated.

“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he added.

The application was derived from internal data from Columbia University following a hack, which was eventually shared with The New York Times.

The hacker was able to steal over 2.5 million applications last Tuesday, spanning over the course of multiple decades to investigate whether the university was still employing affirmative action in their admission decisions.

Mamdani may have potentially been motivated to check the multiple boxes due to the affirmative action admission program the university utilized at the time, which valued the importance of diversity over merit.

Mamdani was able to stun the Democrat establishment in New York City and capture the nomination for mayor over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Meanwhile, multiple community members slammed Mamdani for seemingly exploiting the system of affirmative action in an attempt to gain admission to the ivy league university.

“It’s disgraceful to exploit this country’s legacy of slavery that oppressed African slaves,” Columbia University Jewish Alumni Association member Matthew Schweber told the New York Post.

“Zohran Mamdani’s exploitation of this category further exemplifies the fraudulence of his candidacy and the canard and pretense to speak on behalf of the oppressed. He is a child of privilege and two extraordinarily wealthy parents,” he added.

Additionally, current New York City Mayor Eric Adams slammed Mamdani for “exploiting” the “African American identity.”

“It’s now clear that Zohran Mamdani misrepresented his racial identity to gain admission to Columbia University, and at the time, he wasn’t even a U.S. citizen,” stated Adams campaign spokesperson Todd Shapiro. “We need answers. Because the people of New York Deserve to know whether the man asking for their vote built his career on a possibly fraudulent foundation.”

“The African American identity is not a checkbox of convenience,” Adams stated. “It’s a history, a struggle, and a lived experience. For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive.”

Mamdani, the current frontrunner in the mayoral race, campaigned on city-owned grocery stores, freezing the rent for rent stabilized units, free buses, and a tax increase, among other socialist themed policies.

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