The New York Times Attacks Mamdani With Race Science

Shockingly, race science does not help Jewish people.

Ajay Suresh, CC

Most people of even remotely good will are aware that “race” is not a real thing. There is only one human race; Black people, white people, Asians, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, Irish, are all human. Socially and politically, they may be classified differently in different contexts for various reasons. But if you’re talking about biological or existential truths, these divisions are arbitrary, ad hoc—they’re made up. They have no core truth.

But while many people will say this, they often forget when it’s convenient, and especially when they want to leverage racist animosity. Which brings us to the New York Times’ recent disgusting attack on Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.

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Lots of people don’t fit into boxes

The New York Times granted anonymity to a race science eugenics hustler named Jordan Lasker (who was outed almost immediately.) Lasker provided the Times with hacked records of Columbia application forms. On those forms, Mamdani, who is of South Asian ethnicity and was born in Uganda, checked off “Asian American” and “Black or African-American”; he then wrote in “Ugandan”.

The Times pretty clearly intended to frame this as a scandal—to charge Mamdani with claiming to be African-American in order to get an advantage in admissions. Disgraced corrupt mayor and Trump crony Eric Adams is already attacking Mamdani on these grounds, in an effort to undermine his support with Black voters—and/or in an effort to give voters an excuse to back Adams or to sit out the election on the grounds that “everyone is corrupt”.

These attacks are predicated on the idea that people’s racial identities are firm and fixed, and that they are easily categorizable because they have some sort of formal truth—or are “real.” Lasker believes this because he is a racist Nazi piece of shit. The New York Times maybe believes this because they want to smear Mamdani, and it is convenient.

But contra Lasker and the NYT, it simply isn’t the case that everyone’s racial and ethnic identity is easy to fit into scantron bubbles. For example, many white Jewish students apply to Columbia. And yet, even though this seems like it should be a common and easily represented identity, there is no easy way to represent it on Columbia’s form as provided by the NYT. Here’s that form:

So, if you’re a white Jewish person what do you check here? Fiftysomething me, who has thought about this a fair bit, would just check “white”, probably, since I think that white Jewish people are functionally white in most contexts (and certainly for college admissions to Columbia.)

But there is good faith disagreement on this; novelist Walter Mosely, for example, who is both Jewish and Black, believes that Jews (of any skin color) are not white. And while I’m okay checking white, I’d feel weird identifying as “Caucasian”—a designation based on completely discredited race science which was never meant to include Jews. I could see Jewish students checking off “Middle Eastern” perhaps (though I don’t think that accurately captures the identity of European Jews) or checking “other” and writing in “Jewish” (though some Jewish people might balk at listing “Jewish” as a race.”)

If Columbia’s admission form can pose an insoluble puzzle for white Jewish people—not a rare group on Columbia’s campus—it should hardly be a surprise that less well represented diaspora demogaphics—like, say, Muslim South Asians from Uganda—would struggle to figure out how to identify themselves in ways which feel authentic to them.

Which is what Mamdani said when the NYT went to him for comment on this non-story. “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” he told them. And he added, “Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.”

Mamdani’s desire, as a young person, to be true to himself while filling out his college application may seem naïve or laughable or unlikely to the dead-eyed bigots who edit the Times. But if you aren’t a dead-eyed bigot, it’s pretty reasonable. Most people want to be true to themselves, and they want the institutions they interact with to recognize their full identities and selves. They don’t want to be forced to lie or compromise themselves to get into college. So when they’re presented with a question that demands that they lie or compromise themselves, they try to figure out how to jump through the hoop without leaving chunks of their identity behind.

Good faith admissions officers, and good faith journalists, should recognize the limits of these questions. They should avoid using illegally hacked data to undermine and smear people whose identities are (from the perspective of homogenized mainstream American elite culture) unusual or uncommon. They should not allow Nazis to target people for being different, and they should not allow Nazis to target people for recognizing that racial categories are arbitrary kludges which do not fully encompass people’s complicated experiences.

The New York Times is not a friend to Jews

The NYT, in their attack on Mamdani, is leaning into our current MAGA moment, in which diaspora and immigrant identities (and particularly Muslim identities) are being policed with renewed suspicion and violence. Trump, the mainstream media, and others justify this increased scrutiny and cruelty in part as necessary to protect Jewish people and/or the state of Israel—very distinct things which lots of bad faith assholes are determined to conflate (as I discussed last week.) There’s been a major moral panic designed to make you believe that Mamdani, a Muslim who thinks murdering Palestinians is bad, is a threat to Jewish people.

But are Jewish people actually protected when you rush to mainstream Nazi “race realists”? Or when you legitimize hacking Columbia student records and weaponizing the results against students who don’t perfectly fit into Colubmia’s racial categorization system? Again, lots of Jewish kids apply to Columbia; many of them might be confused about how to honestly represent themselves in response to these questions.

Aggressively policing diaspora identity is not a boon for Jewish people. It’s not a boon for Black people either, many of whom (like, say, Kamala Harris or Barack Obama) also have complicated backgrounds if the standard is set by white American bigots.

The Times is pushing for a New York, and an America, in which people like Mamdani, and people like Jews, have to defend their identities and their existence according to rubrics laid out by people like Jordan Lasker. Race isn’t real, but racism is—and when racists get to say whose lives are real and whose are fake, the only people who win are the Nazis.