Desheania Andrews and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon write for the New York Post about the latest criticism of New York City’s leading mayoral candidate.
Black New York isn’t buying it.
A slew of black Big Apple residents fumed Friday over mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s claim on an Ivy League college application that he is African American — with them raging the socialist pol is a “fraud” and “trickster.”
“He’s just trying to get over,” an 86-year-old Harlem resident, identifying herself only as Marjorie, said of Mamdani, a socialist of Asian Indian descent.
“You can look at him and see he’s not” black, she said. “Absolutely not.
“I don’t like him. I didn’t like him from the first time I heard him. You can look at him and see he’s a trickster,” she said of the pol, who struggled mightily to make inroads among black voters at the Democratic primary-race polls last month, despite his stunning win.
Another longtime local who asked not to be identified seethed, “He’s a fraud.
“He’s a foreigner. He ain’t no African American,” the man said of Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a naturalized US citizen in 2018 and holds dual citizenship between the countries.
A Bronx resident named Joshua added, “He’s a liar. Point-blank, period.
“We don’t need a lying mayor or a mayor that says he’s black so he can get black people to vote for him.
“We black,” he said. “We ain’t stupid.”
Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, had checked off the “black of African American” and “Asian” boxes on his 2009 Columbia University application regarding his race, the New York Times reported last week.
The university, where Mamdani’s father was and still is a professor, had affirmative-action-friendly admissions policies at the time, which the pol’s critics allege he may have been trying to take advantage of. Either way, Mamdani failed to get into the prestigious school.
Mamdani told the Times that while he doesn’t consider himself black or African American, he is “an American who was born in Africa” — and simply felt the other choices on the form didn’t fully address who he is.
