On her 64th birthday, in 2012, the conceptual artist Adrian Piper “retired from being black.” She posted a digitally altered portrait of herself, rendered in gray scale, and included a message underneath: “Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage,” Piper wrote on her website. “Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!”
Piper’s gesture highlights the problem with the color categories that many Americans are asked to box themselves into, an exercise that frequently relies on arbitrary notions, or selective readings, of long and complicated ancestry. She was calling attention to the fact that such reductive concepts as “black” and “white”—designations that imply varying degrees of privilege or oppression and help determine access to opportunity and recognition—govern our institutions and, to no small extent, our lives.
I thought of Piper last week when The New York Times revealed that Zohran Mamdani, the surprise winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, had identified himself as “Black/African American” and “Asian” on an unsuccessful application to Columbia University in 2009. In justifying his choice, Mamdani unwittingly revealed the absurdity of affirmative action and the racial categorizing it requires.
“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, who was born in Uganda to ethnically Indian parents, said in response to the report. “Even though these boxes are constraining,” Mamdani continued, “I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.” He told the Times that he specified “Ugandan” elsewhere on the form, and that he considered himself “an American who was born in Africa,” not Black or African American.
For Mamdani—who moved to New York at age 7 and did not become a U.S. citizen until 2018—to have indicated that he is “African American” is no less ridiculous than South African–born Elon Musk calling himself the same. Musk doesn’t claim that title, but many of his right-wing supporters sarcastically attribute it to him. These trolls seem to relish violating the definition that most of America intuitively ascribes to African American. But evidently they at least understand that, in common parlance, it means “Black.” Whether the same could be said for Mamdani is less clear.
Mamdani’s critics have accused him of cynically manipulating affirmative action, a system that persists in higher education and beyond, despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning it from college admissions. If they’re right, he would hardly be the first to do so. Affirmative action encourages, even demands, opportunistic racial accounting, especially when social norms dictate that another person’s self-identification shouldn’t be called into question—a view that many of Mamdani’s defenders have articulated in recent days.
Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter whether Mamdani is “African,” “Asian,” or even “Caucasian,” as some Indians have historically argued they are. Indeed, affirmative action was instituted precisely so that employers would not base their decisions on those categories. The term entered the American lexicon in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order calling for “affirmative action to ensure that applicants”—government contractors, in this case—“are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” As the writer Thomas Sowell has noted, the system’s purpose was “to make sure that those who had been discriminated against in the past would no longer be discriminated against in the future.”
Affirmative action was not originally concerned, as it is now, with the promotion of nebulous interpretations of “diversity” and “representation.” It was meant to redress discrimination, particularly the state-sanctioned exclusion from opportunity that specific communities of Americans and their descendants once faced, such as the descendants of African slaves in the United States.
Mamdani, though, faced no such lack of opportunity. His father is a tenured Columbia professor, and his mother is an Oscar-nominated film director. His upbringing was, by any measure, “privileged,” to use his own description. Setting aside the ontologically dubious notion that Mamdani is “Black/African American,” I would contend that these social facts alone should disqualify him from special consideration on a college application.
Affirmative action, even with regard to Black Americans, was intended only as a temporary solution to oppression. The time has long since passed when the well-to-do of any nation or ethnicity should be afforded a leg up in college admissions. The only defensible continuation of the practice, as I have argued, is to extend it to the poor and disadvantaged of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Race-based preferences are too easy to game, through some unfalsifiable alchemy of self-definition and often-vicarious experience of struggle. They sow resentment and division not only among Asian and white people who reject the use of double standards, but also among many descendants of American slaves who cannot see the logic of policies that treat anyone with a connection to Africa as fundamentally interchangeable.
“Race is a social construct,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2023, articulating a view that has only recently been taken for granted by the American mainstream, though it is coming into question in some of the more sinister corners of the political right. “Whereas universities today would group all white applicants together, white elites previously sought to exclude Jews and other white immigrant groups from higher education,” he continued. “Yet, university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups … Whichever choice he makes (in the event he chooses to report a race at all), the form silos him into an artificial category. Worse, it sends a clear signal that the category matters.”
The real scandal of Mamdani’s application has to do not with his self-presentation but with the arbitrary and insidious racial boundaries that America’s academic, cultural, and political institutions continue to squeeze people into. If Mamdani’s justification is sincere, he and Thomas are effectively in agreement: All of these boxes are worthless. It is past time we stop filling them in.
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