Some expensive looking rings you’ve got on there… especially for a Socialist.
Suffice it to say that I’m no fan of the appellation “African-American.” I’m also not much of a fan of “black-American.”
I would certainly at least respect someone who described themselves as an American first, and then someone of Equitorial West African lineage.
After all, Teddy R was right;
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”
With all that aside, more than a few residents of the Big Apple have found out that the winner of the Democrat primary for mayor, Zohran Mamdani of the Democratic Socialist Party, was found to having described himself as an “African-American” on his college entrance paperwork back in 2009.
But to ensure he covered all the bases, he also checked off “Asian”… just in case.
I will come clean and admit that Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian-Muslim parents who moved to South Africa before finally relocating to New York City. Just me, but I wonder if this guy also considers Elon Musk as an “African-American”?
Anyhow, more than a few New Yorkers are quite pissed.
As reported by Desheania Andrews and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon of the New York Post (emphasis mine);
Black New York isn’t buying it.
A slew of black Big Apple residents fumed Friday over mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s claim on an Ivy League college application that he is African American — with them raging the socialist pol is a “fraud” and “trickster.”
“He’s just trying to get over,” an 86-year-old Harlem resident, identifying herself only as Marjorie, said of Mamdani, a socialist of Asian Indian descent.
“You can look at him and see he’s not” black, she said. “Absolutely not.”
“He’s a foreigner. He ain’t no African American,” the man said of Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a naturalized US citizen in 2018 and holds dual citizenship between the countries.
A Bronx resident named Joshua added, “He’s a liar. Point-blank, period. “We black,” he said. “We ain’t stupid.”
Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, had checked off the “black or African American” and “Asian” boxes on his 2009 Columbia University application regarding his race, the New York Times reported last week.
The university, where Mamdani’s father was and still is a professor, had affirmative-action-friendly admissions policies at the time, which the pol’s critics allege he may have been trying to take advantage of. Either way, Mamdani failed to get into the prestigious school.