If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications. Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.
In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American. His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran. Robin continued:
Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side, firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.
The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census. What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate. Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa. White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds. Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.
Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans? Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US. But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix. So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians. Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.
I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities. They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities. I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so. So I let it go. As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.
I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys. (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?) I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost. If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races.
Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives. First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before. Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference? No, not really.
The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care. They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick. One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.
