#26 On the Imperialism of US Ethnic Categories
Zohran Mamdani's Crime: not fitting into America's neat little boxes
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 that the Holocaust was not "about race" because it involved "white people doing it to white people." This perspective, while widely criticized, is an extreme case of this very American-centric view where racism is seen exclusively as something that can take place between a monolithic "white" group and various "non-white" groups. It also overlooks the historical reality that racial categories are fluid and changing. Try telling a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1960s that they couldn't be an oppressed minority because they were white. Or ignoring the differences between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda in the 1990s because they’re all “African.”
It also overlooks the fact that race and ethnicity are social constructs. In fact, the very definition of "whiteness" has never been stable. Over the last two centuries, groups we now consider unequivocally white—such as the Irish, Slavs, and Italians—were once deemed racially distinct and inferior by the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. As Kenan Malik writes, this American talent for racial line-drawing was even admired by Nazi leaders. Before the Holocaust, Nazi officials looked to the U.S. as an "innovative world leader in the creation of racist law," finding American models for defining racial purity, like the "one-drop rule," to be a "most useful source" for their own Nuremberg Laws.
When this rigid American framework is applied globally, the results often lead to absurdity. South African singer Tyla identifies as "coloured," a distinct and officially recognized mixed-race cultural identity in South Africa. Yet, in the United States, where the word is linked to the Jim Crow era of segregation, her self-identification was met with outrage. Many Americans demanded she stop using a term they viewed as a slur. This is a form of imperialism: to dismiss her identity is to erase the unique history and existence of an entire community, demanding they conform to a foreign set of historical grievances. It’s a stark example of how the American historical context is imposed as a universal standard.
What is also interesting is that the inflexibility of this racial framework has even led others to try to fit themselves within it. The 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind is a good example. At the time, only White or Black people could gain US citizenship. Thind, an Indian Sikh man, argued for his right to naturalization not on the grounds that citizenship should be open to all ethnicities, but on the basis that, anthropologically, Indians were of "Aryan" or "Caucasian" stock and therefore "white." The Court unanimously rejected his claim, ruling that "whiteness" was not a matter of scientific classification but of "common sense" understanding. Because the "common man" would not see him as white, he was legally deemed not white. The ruling stripped many Indian Americans of their citizenship, demonstrating how American law actively constructed a narrow, exclusionary definition of whiteness with bad real-world consequences.
As a person of Portuguese descent, my own experience has been one of generally identifying as white, like say, the French, Spaniards and Italians. Yet, I have learned within the American system, that this identity is surprisingly unstable because it tends to be conflated with Latinos/Hispanics, who are considered nonwhite. I was quite surprised to discover in an article in The Atlantic that Portuguese Americans have been classified and reclassified over the decades—sometimes a minority, sometimes not; for a time Hispanic, then white again. Today, they are not a federal minority, but this varies by state. And this classification can matter for eligibility for preferential treatment in college applications, public procurement contracts, and the like. The fact is that most people around the world don’t neatly into any of America’s prescribed boxes.