Box People

In what feels like a pretty transparent attempt to rile up controversy, the New York Times ran an article yesterday about Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identifying as ‘African American’ in an application to Columbia University (archive link). There’s a lot to unpack with this article, from the question of the motivation behind running a nearly-1500 word article about a fifteen-year-old application to the primary source of the information being not only leaked, ostensibly private admissions information but one sourced via a white-supremacist eugenicist. 

But I’ve little ink to spill on the ethics of the article. Rather, I’m focused on the question of what box to check on those applications and similar demographic surveys. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to an Indian father who had lived there for years, considered himself both ‘Asian’ and ‘African American’ on the form. While there is certainly something cheeky about it (as you’d expect from a teenager), it does also highlight just how insufficient these little boxes are when it comes to talking about race and ethnicity.

When I moved to the United States at fifteen I suddenly discovered that I was Asian. Not that I hadn’t been before, but within the US, ‘Asian’ denotes a very particular racial identity and niche, one that subsumes nuance into an easy category: no longer was I half Singaporean-Chinese, I was ‘Asian.’

I don’t think it was until filling out the demographic survey for the PSAT later that year that I came across the term Asian American. Here, I thought, was a box for me: I was Asian and American, courtesy of what was no doubt a large population of fellow half-Asian, half-white people. Turns out, no, Asian American is a whole thing with roots in a political movement to see those of Asian descent allowed to be considered American in an attempt to move away from being the perpetual foreigners. Claiming the American appellation is a defiant statement of belonging, declaring an equal share of the United States.

What box(es) applied to me? The kid from Singapore who grew up on a ship with a Singaporean-Chinese father and a Norwegian-American mother? I remember toying with the idea of checking Pacific Islander because, technically, Singapore is an island in the Pacific Ocean so, that counts, right? Race and ethnicity is not an easy question, one that fluctuates depending on the politics of where I am. Trying to figure out how these boxes applied to me (and how I applied to those boxes).

At the end of it all, I don’t remember what I checked for that PSAT, nor for the actual SAT, nor in turn for my eventual college admissions (including one to Columbia). When I heard about Mamdani checking ‘African American’ I saw something very familiar in trying to figure out how to define a complex background into those little boxes offered by a system that yearns to catalogue. I see no duplicity on his part, just a teenager who was trying to figure out how he fit into the systems of the world.

For me, that’s meant listing my race as ‘Sino-Nordic’.