#26 On the Imperialism of US Ethnic Categories

A recent New York Times hit piece story about Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia 15 years ago, where he identified as both Asian and African American, highlights something I have been thinking about before: the imperialism of US racial categories, how they are imposed on the rest of the world, and how they struggle to accommodate the complexity of racial boundaries in other places. I won’t delve into the fact that the source of the story is a eugenicist that got access to hacked data, which is discussed more in depth by Don Moynihan here.

Zohran Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent. Like UK politician Priti Patel, Mamdani comes from an ethnic group that was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the 1970s. Ethnically, he is Indian (and Muslim, in his case). People of South Asian descent had been living in Uganda since the turn of the 20th century, first brought over as contract labourers before becoming a prosperous minority post-independence. When he applied to Columbia University as a high school senior in 2009, the application form presented a series of boxes that struggled to make sense of this background. He checked both "Asian" and "Black or African American," and even wrote in "Ugandan." Mamdani was trying to fit his identity into the framework of ethnicity and race in the US, which tends to be self-centered and considers only its own categories pertinent. Now he is being blamed for having misrepresented his background because he is not Black, even if, well, ticking the Asian and African-American boxes doesn’t seem that far fetched if one is born in Africa within a South Asian family.

It’s an illustration of a widespread and problematic phenomenon: the imposition of American racial boundaries on a world whose identities are far too complex for such categorization. Because of the global dominance of the US, this paradoxically leads to a form of imperialism justified by the respect for its own minorities. This American-centric paradigm, born from the country's unique and painful history, often clashes with how identity is understood and experienced elsewhere.

Of course, the racial framework of the United States was forged in the traumatic experience of slavery and its aftermath, resulting in a system often distilled into a stark binary of "white" and "non-white." Imposing this framework elsewhere can be dangerous. A couple of years ago, Whoopi Goldberg asserted ...