House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) refused to address a claim made by leading New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on his college application years ago regarding his ethnicity.
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Jeffries joined Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” Saturday to discuss Democratic mayoral candidate Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist who defeated former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the party’s nomination. Jeffries had previously criticized Mamdani over past comments about Israel and Palestine, calling them “unacceptable.”
The discussion followed a New York Times report Thursday that revealed, based on hacked records, Mamdani identified himself as both “Black or African American” and “Asian” in his 2009 college application to Columbia University. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents, told the paper in an interview that, “he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather ‘an American who was born in Africa.’
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“He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process,” the article states.
After the publication of that article, a video from April of this year went viral featuring comments from the candidate on that specific type of identification.
A New York performance artist and ambush interviewer who goes by the handle “Crackhead Barney” asked Mamdani: “Would you claim the African- American status like Elon Musk?”
“No, I would not claim that status,” Mamdani replied.
