Don't mess with the Zohran
A scandal of admission, admissions, omissions but fortunately no emissions
Zohran has, in effect, been accused of lying about his race in an attempt to gain admission to Columbia University by the New York Times {I mean, they didn’t say it quite like that, but that’s the thrust of what they’re insinuating by publishing the article}.
It appears the worst thing he did was tick a box saying he was “Black or African American,” and that his basis for doing so is that he is an American from Africa. I include an image of the form below. He ticked “African American” as well as “Asian” and wrote in “Ugandan” next to the “other” (for context, he lived in Uganda till he was seven.)
There’s an image circulating of a status or coding in the system of him as “Black non-Hispanic,” but he didn’t select that himself. His coding in the system was based on his selection of “Black or African American” and his non-selection of Hispanic, leading the computer to code him “Black non-Hispanic”. As the form was done by hand, it’s unlikely Zohran ever knew he was coded in the system as Black non-Hispanic.
Now, it is true that it is wrong, given how the term is usually used, to say Zohran is “African American”, and thus he shouldn’t have selected it. But that he got something wrong is not terribly interesting in itself. The important question is, did he lie?
I would identify three possibilities:
He did it on purpose, knowing it was wrong but thinking he could get away with it.
He genuinely thought it was true at the time.
A grey area where he sort of knew it wasn’t right, but the form was confusing, and what he said was technically accurate, and he wasn’t trying to deceive per se. E.g., he was more shoddy than dishonest.
Taking the case but deidentifying it- abstracting away from everything I know about Mamdani except his basic backstory, I’d assign:
A 30% probabilitythat he lied on purpose.
A 15% probability that he genuinely wholeheartedly thought it was true that he was African American and
A 55% chance of some kind of grey area where he didn’t think he was lying per se, but he was struggling with a form that wasn’t exactly accommodating to his situation, and trying to respond to his incentives given Affirmative Action, leading to a fuck up on his part.
Maybe you weigh it differently, that’s your right, but I see no strong evidence of dishonesty-understood as knowing deception.
Some people have argued that the fact that putting black would increase his chances of gaining admission must surely have affected his reasons for putting it down. I strongly suspect it did. This does not establish dishonesty. People gravitate towards options that are favourable to them where there is ambiguity. Let me give a tip for those of you who haven’t figured it out yet- when applying for anything, the idea is to say whatever will maximise your chance of getting your prize, while avoiding dishonesty. That’s what everyone else is doing [albeit a lot of them are probably skipping the no-dishonesty part]. You shouldn’t lie about being African American, but in a case where there is some ambiguity, but you can honestly and without deception in your heart, say “I’m an African American” and you’re applying for an Ivy League College, YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD. I had a guy once who wasn’t sure whether he was bi or not, ask me whether or not he should put he identified as queer down on a job application at an NGO. I asked him, “Would you be lying if you said you were queer?”. No, he responded. Then put it down.
Does that mean that affirmative action spots will often go to people who only tangentially or marginally belong to oppressed groups, making AA an imperfect instrument? Yes, and that’s a shame. It’s a topic I’ve written on previously. But within the bounds of honesty, in a ruthless, anonymised process like college admissions, individuals have to stick up for their own interests. AA isn’t perfect even within the bounds of what it sets out to do.
Also worth remembering: The event happened half a lifetime ago when Zohran was either a juvenile or had just become an adult.
Some people, including Cremieux, the source of the NYT’s scoop, are arguing that he must have known he was African American because he wasn’t an American citizen at the time- meaning he didn’t meet the second requirement of “African American”. This is embarrassingly stupid. You can absolutely regard yourself as an an American without legal citizenship, and anyone would likely do so if they grew up there since they were seven.
The information was gained through a hack of Columbia’s admissions databases by someone seeking to prove that Columbia was engaging in illegally preferencing candidates from minorities. My understanding is that the information was then shared with the New York Times by Ceremiux, an Academic and would-be race scientist. Claims that the source should be irrelevant to the choice of whether or not to publish it are not consistent with the Times' own practice- for example, the Times refused to publish a dirt dossier on JD Vance because of concerns about Iranian provenance.
In sum, the substantive allegation happened a long time in the past, and there is no good evidence of dishonesty per se here, so it’s weak. The procedural injustice further undermines the case for weighing it heavily: The New York Times is promoting it for cynical reasons, given that it doesn’t meet their usual standards. The information was obtained in an unethical way, and unless something REALLY bad is dug up, there are good incentive reasons to not let people manipulate the discourse by hacking databases. So we should treat it as inadmissible, and even if it were admitted, it would be a tiny consideration for any rational voter.
I saw online someone arguing that people defending Zohran on the basis that the information was gathered illegitimately are being ridiculous- the fruit of the poisoned tree is a legal doctrine, not a moral one. I think that’s wrong. Not only do I apply the fruit of the poisoned tree doctrine to politics, but I even apply it in day-to-day life decision-making.
I’ve argued in the past on this Substack that some things we know are inadmissible. If I know a job candidate’s father is a murderer, I have information that tells against his quality as a candidate, since there is a strong correlation between apples and how far they fall from the tree (whether for reasons of behavioural genetics or upbringing- take your pick). In a tight field, this information might well be decisive. Nevertheless, I am bound by ethical propriety to pretend this isn’t true- I must exclude any awareness that being the son of a murderer reduces expected job performance. Such knowledge must be disregarded because we don’t want to live in a society where people are judged by their parents. That is widely agreed, I think. Where I may go a bit further than others is in thinking that inadmissibility can apply to information that has been obtained immorally.
Occasionally, inadmissible knowledge may be used when the stakes are very grave. A four-pronged balancing test, which considers the probative value of the evidence, the harms of using the inadmissible knowledge to the subject to whom the knowledge relates, the importance of the question, and how, why, and to what degree the information is inadmissible, is necessary.
Most people have skeletons in their closets. Spend some time on a real event OCD forum or seeking out people’s darkest secrets if you don’t believe me. This means that, as a society, we are vulnerable to manipulation by unethical muckrakers who, with enough patience and sometimes illegal searching, can make just about anyone look terrible. The way to resist this is to have strong norms against publicising unethically obtained dirt on individuals unless it passes the balancing test I gave above. Due to the time elapsed, the youth of the putative offender, the method by which the materials were obtained, the motive for which the materials were obtained, and the lack of solid evidence of deliberate dishonesty, the test is not passed.
I’m working on a Substack article at the moment based on a new philosophical account of privacy and privacy breaches. I think that the greatest wrong in breaches of privacy is that they unjustly distribute goods, including economic and esteem goods. Most privacy breaches revealing negative information have a prejudicial effect greater than their public benefit, hence unjust distribution. One way in which this is true- in which the prejudicial effect exceeds the public benefit- is that who gets unpleasant truths about them leaked can be selectively manipulated by malicious government, corporate, and individual actors. Stay tuned for that.
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A couple facts that contribute to p(actually considered himself to be African-American):
1] his father is a scholar of post-colonial studies who explicitly identifies as Ugandan and writes extensively on African statehood etc. I can't imagine they never talked about this in the Mamdani household
2] various reports that Mamdani would say he was Ugandan while at primary school
3] other applications at the time used the phrasing African-American/Black/African rather than simply African-American
4] his middle name is literally Kwame, his parents clearly care about the African component of their cultural heritage and likely instilled that in him
Many of the people mad at this (or pretending to be) seem to not understand that somebody whose grandparents were born in Africa may non-trivially consider himself to be African.
On the “fruit of the poisoned tree” aspect, I think I see two points that are a bit different. One is that only unusual cases will have these bits of “inadmissible” evidence dug up and brought out, but many people have this same sort of evidence that remains hidden, so that using it for all and only the people that have it dug up will lead to a misleading impression of those individuals. Another is that we want our epistemic practices to discourage bad practices on the part of others and not just produce good epistemic outcomes for ourselves, so we should have a practice of ignoring this evidence in order to dissuade people from doing the dirty work of digging it up.
My interpretation of the law was always about the second (particularly since the dirty digging is done by the party that has something to gain from the court finding in their favor). But I suspect that outside legal contexts, you have to lean more on the first.
In this case, if the worst they’ve dug up on him is that he checked off this technically accurate but highly misleading box while applying to college, that seems like no more than you can find on most people.
In any case, it looks like he wasn’t accepted to Columbia! (Though I wonder if he did the same thing on other applications? And I wonder if Elon Musk has checked off “African-American” for any government contracts that care about minority owned businesses?)