The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application

There are a lot of questions worth asking about the New York Times’s report on Thursday about New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The most obvious is how Mamdani’s racial self-identification in his 2009 application to Columbia University — the university where his father was a tenured professor — has any bearing on his current candidacy. Another is whether the Times should have granted anonymity to the source of the story, a man described by the Guardian as a “proponent of eugenics.” Yet another is whether the news value of the story outweighed its provenance: a hack of personal informationfrom the university by a politically motivated hacker.

But there is nonetheless value to the story: It offers an excellent distillation of the narrow and archaic way Americans evaluate race — both personally and institutionally.

Mamdani’s family is South Asian but lived in Uganda for decades. His father wrote an essay for the London Review of Books in 2022 describing the family’s expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin and how so many natives of India had come to...