I Don’t Care That Zohran Lied Then. I Care That He’s Lying Now.

Mamdani and his supporters are turning an encouraging political moment into an embarrassing one.

***Correction: The original version of this piece incorrectly implied that a post authored by Nikole Hannah-Jones, of 1619 Project fame, stated that while Zohran Mamdani is not “racially black,” he is “politically black.” This was an error. The post itself is real, so far as I can tell, but was written years ago and had nothing to do with Zohran Mamdani. The mistake was mine and Ms. Jones has my sincere apologies. The offending passage has been deleted, as has the audio version of this piece which could not be easily edited to omit the falsehood.

Assuming the reporting is correct - and it appears to be - Zohran Mamdani, as a high school senior, did what probably thousands of American college applicants do every year: he tried to game the system.

I know it. You know it. He knows it. And his supporters know it.

Elite universities openly discriminate against applicants based on their race, and have done so for decades. Even in the face of court rulings saying they must knock it off.

I have this friend. We’ll call him Helmut.

Helmut, like me, appears to be a basic bitch, nondescript, run-of-the-mill white dude. And with a name like Helmut (not his actual name, but the real one is similar) Helmut is assumed by everyone he meets to be of German descent. And he is, to the tune of about 25%. The other 75% is all Latin American. Dad’s a first generation immigrant, as is his maternal grandmother.

Technically and undeniably, Helmut is Hispanic. Back in the aughts, when we were applying to colleges, Helmut was having a slight moral dilemma. He knew full well that Hispanic was a less competitive racial category than White, and that his odds of being admitted to a top university would increase dramatically if he checked the Hispanic box rather than the White one. But he also knew that that was a little cheap.

Helmut didn’t really think of himself as Latin American. He didn’t connect in any special way with that part of his cultural or racial history, and didn’t look any different to the full-fat white folks he grew up around.

In a similar case, another classmate of mine, Nancy O’Reilly (also not her real name, but also close enough for our parable to be truthful), also turned out to be technically eligible to check the Hispanic box on her applications. I didn’t know Nancy as well, and she may have had a deeper bond with her Latin roots than Helmut did, but it was another case of, “wait…Nancy’s what?”

I don’t rightly remember what either of them decided to do in the end. I only remember what I advised both of them emphatically to do: check the Hispanic box!

Why the hell wouldn’t they? It wasn’t a lie in either case. If anyone sniffed around - possible, given their not-at-all Latinx names - they could 100% back up the racial claims they’d made about themselves. Both were smart, talented students, both deserved the best shot at the best institutes of higher learning, and both would have been responding truthfully to a (silly and intrusive) question on a high-stakes application form.

They were being asked about their blood lineage and my advice was: tell the truth about your blood lineage. If colleges wanted to know whether their mothers were more likely to serve churros or casseroles, or whether they listened more to Selena or REM, they could’ve asked that. They didn’t. They wanted to know, “what color is your blood?” So I said, “tell them the color of your blood.” And seize the glorious reward.

Zohran Mamdani’s case is different, but not that different. Zohran selected both the Asian and Black or African-American boxes, on the grounds that he is of Indian ancestry but was born and raised in Uganda, and has Ugandan citizenship.

The ethics of this are, in my view, slightly murkier than what Helmut and Nancy were considering. But only slightly. Asian, sure. No lies there. But African-American is a more loaded term. Since Mamdani is by no standard ‘Black,’ his having checked that box implying that he was African-American makes me squint a little.

For one thing - and I realize nobody cares about this - but he actually wasn’t an American citizen at the time he was applying. He wasn’t Anything-American until 2018.

But the main issue: African-American is a term we use to refer to black Americans who don’t necessarily claim any other citizenship or direct ancestry (even when they know that ancestry, à la Barack Obama).

Nobody considers Rami Malek or Omar Sharif “African-Americans” even though both are/were Americans and both have/had ancestry in Africa (Egypt). And of course - as many commentators have already pointed out - the people excusing Zohran’s box ticking would self-immolate in vengeful protest if Elon Musk started referring to himself as “African-American.”

Is it a clumsy term? Yes. Does it, on paper, exclude a lot of black Americans, like those from Jamaica or Barbados? Yes. Does it, on paper, include a lot of Americans who we definitely don’t think should be using the term, like white South Africans or Tunisians? Yes.

But…is it an unclear term? No.

We know who it describes, who it doesn’t describe, and that is not - not even a little tiny bit - Zohran Mamdani. If you were trying to point out Zohran Mamdani in the line at Starbucks, you would simply not say, “That one. The African-American man.”

But you know what? I don’t care. Good for him, giving himself the edge. Checking that box was close enough to truthful that I can give him a pass, even if I’m not sure I would have expressly encouraged it, as I did with Helmut and Nancy.

Getting into college is hard. Getting into elite colleges is harder, and consequential. Where you go matters. If there’s a gameable system that can give kids a leg up, or take it away, nobody should need a fainting couch upon learning that some kids game it to their advantage.

But…

I am absolutely over being lied to about what happened here. And that’s what Zohran and his supporters are doing.

Rounding up to African-American (if a lie at all) is a white, forgivable lie. Pretending he did this out of some need to be fully truthful about his complex, racial tapestry is splashing an entire bladderful of piss into my ear and insisting it’s rain.

He did it to get an advantage. I know it, you know it, and he knows it. An African-American was likely to enjoy more favorable odds than an Asian or a member of another racial category, he was playing those odds, and so he ticked the box. And now he should just say that.

But what he said instead was this:

“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background. Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.”

Dude, horseshit.

And hey, just an aside, if the boxes are “constraining,” one option would be…not having them? Just sayin, no one is actually making colleges do this. Sure, we could “unconstrain” them; a box for Malian-Lithuanian, another for Chilean-Laotian, and so on. Or we could just stop being insane and put less stock in the skin pigmentation of applicants. There are options, is my point.

His supporters are even worse.

To hear them tell it, Zohran Mamdani - a kid evidently smart enough to have a shot at Columbia (though he didn’t get in), and smart enough to run a successful mayoral primary in America’s largest city - became hopelessly lost in a postcolonial, racial morass and innocently tried to be too truthful, completely ignorant of any benefits it might net him.

Here’s Rebecca Solnit:

“The broader conversations the [NYT] piece generated include many reflections on the mutability of racial categories and how differently they have been viewed over time and in other countries, which might be a factor in how a teenage boy born in Africa might think about himself and understand the boxes.”

Aww. Poor kid just didn’t understand.

Some took aim at the Times for daring to print the “hit piece” at all, especially since the scoop came to them by way of an illegal hack, a Twitterite who talks about race science, and gave (excellent) journalist, Benjamin Ryan a byline. Ryan’s crime - a doozy, to be sure - is that he is best known for his faithful and accurate coverage of the debate over youth gender medicine.

Guys, this stuff is embarrassing.

I have mixed feelings about Zohran’s candidacy. Some of his ideas excite me and others confuse me. Mostly, I have a hard time imagining a political neophyte enacting half of what he wants to in a notoriously complicated and unruly city.

That cuts both ways, of course. His supporters should probably temper their expectations, and his apocalypse-predicting detractors should probably have a Valium and get some sleep. The second coming of Lenin, this guy is not.

But this college app story is washing away one of the best features of Zohran’s victory: the electoral advancement of the anti-establishment left.

America’s right and center do not want economic populism to have a fair hearing in an either-or contest. That’s why they fought so hard against Bernie, and that’s why they melted down so hard when Mamdani won his primary. Similarly, the Israel lobby does not want America’s most Jewish city voting for an Israel critic. Win or lose, succeed or fail, Mamdani is a shock to a political system that badly needs shocking.

And nobody’s talking about it. And nobody will be, because the left has been fantastically baited into serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of their favored race gobbledygook, and Mamdani’s opponents have seized on it.

“The system was there to be gamed and I gamed it. Sorry not sorry.”

That’s all he had to say. Nobody who liked him before would’ve stopped liking him after that, the people who already didn’t like him weren’t going to be swayed anyway, and I promise, there’s not an undecided out there who doesn’t know somebody who did what he did or would have a hard time understanding why he did it.

Instead, he went for Door #2: Obvious Nonsense. And his orbiting commentariat are amplifying it. It’s the classic political Catch-22; if he’s honestly innocent of having played fast and loose, he’s an idiot, which is worse than being a fast-and-loose player. A mayor can play fast-and-loose. A mayor really shouldn’t be an idiot.

The right loves this conversation, by the way, and not just because it’s bad politics for Mamdani. It’s bad politics for the whole left. The left has never had an easy time defending affirmative action, because at heart, it’s unfairness in the name of fairness. That’s a tricky needle to thread, and we’ve never gotten good at talking about it. On one hand, affirmative action is billed as completely necessary for an equitable society, but on the other hand, we must never talk about any individual having benefited from it because that would be insulting and racist.

So once again, what could have been an instructive conversation about economic populism has devolved into a carnival of leftist identity slop.

And it’s only been two weeks.