Mamdani didn't lie. He is an African American.

I see that among the many attacks on Zohran Mamdani is the charge that he filled out a college application form deceptively. But the fault was in Columbia's form — and, some will say, in its policy of race consciousness:

[A]s a high school senior in 2009 ... [a]sked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

I'm reading "Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application/Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat running for mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda. He doesn’t consider himself Black but said the application didn’t allow for the complexity of his background" (NYT). 

So it depends on what the meaning of "or" is. It could mean "African American" is another way to say "Black," but it could mean check this box if you are either black or African Amercan or both. Mamdani didn't write the form. He filled it out. Now, of course, he knew there was a special advantage to be gained and that "Asian" wasn't much help if any, but he didn't lie. He perceived the potential for selfish advantage and he took it, and now he is offering to bring his advantage-taking skill to the people of New York. Where there is an edge to be gained, Mamdani will grab it for you, the citizens of New York City.

By the way, it is almost surely the case that Columbia wanted applicants to err on the side of claiming to belong to one of the minority groups Columbia gave an advantage to. It may have cared how the class looked when assembled in the auditoriums, and it may have even cared about the much touted educational benefits of a diverse student body. But it's safe to assume that Columbia wanted the racial percentages to look good on paper. If self-advantagers like Mamdani allowed Columbia, back in 2010, to say it had 14.5% "Black or African American" students instead of, say, 10%, Columbia would benefit. What's the problem? Fairness to applicants without the guts to interpret the form in their favor

ADDED: The Times of India explains to its readers:

[I]n America, Blackness is recognised as a political identity born of struggle and oppression. Indian-American identity, by contrast, is often invisible—treated as an immigrant economic niche rather than a racial group needing justice. This is why even Kamala Harris, with a Tamil mother, emphasised her Black identity throughout her rise. The road to power in the US runs smoother through narratives of African American struggle than through the unrelatable caste-linguistic divisions of South Asia. Harris never denied her Indian heritage, but in political messaging, her mother’s dosa recipes were a footnote to her identity as a Black woman, a Howard alum, a beneficiary of the civil rights movement. To many Indian Americans, this choice felt strategic—because American categories do not accommodate multiple truths....

The hack that revealed his application data showed no speeches or interviews where Mamdani ever called himself Black or African American. Indeed, his political identity today is rooted in his South Asian Muslim heritage....

The deeper problem is that these boxes themselves are relics of imperial racial classification systems. British colonial governments divided populations into neat ethno-racial columns to control them; the US census and college applications inherited this logic. They leave no space for Indian-Ugandans, Indo-Caribbeans, or Tamil Malaysians—global citizens whose identities transcend national borders....

Ultimately, Mamdani’s saga is not about affirmative action cheating or woke posturing. It is about the impossibility of conveying ancestral history, racial experience, birthplace, migration, expulsion, diaspora, and faith into two or three colonial tick-boxes....

For all his effort to gain advantage — or, if we are to believe him, to begin to convey the particularity of his identity — Mamdani did not get into Columbia. He attended Bowdoin college.