Have It My Way
On Identity, Mamdani & the Boxes We Still Check
Hi Faunts,
This piece was originally written as an op-ed for a newspaper that sparked my interest in journalism as a kid.
It didn’t get picked up—cool. I rep hard for the Burger King Generation. I want it my way—published.
So what’s my way got to do with today’s post? Last week’s Mamdani-admissions story? Everything. Bring intellectual rigor and nuance to conversations about multicultural identity, and add a dollop of humility, please, and thank you.
Fight me.
About that Burger King Generation reference. I borrowed it from a NYC faunt (my word, not hers) in the Bronx I saw on IG. She said when she was in the army, her drill sergeant called her a Burger King private because she wanted to do things her way, not the army’s.
As for me? My way? Just like a Haitian in Brooklyn when ICE shows up—I use my voice.
Enjoy the read. If it resonates, let me know what you think!
The Boxes We Check: A Defense of Zohran Mamdani and Multicultural Identity
Mayor Eric Adams is angry about boxes. Specifically, the ones NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani checked on his college application years ago. Born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent, Mamdani identified as Asian and African-American when applying to Columbia University in 2009. Adams, who is Black American and running as an independent, sees this as somehow fraudulent. But Adams's outrage reveals a troubling rigidity in how we think about race and identity in America.
The controversy reveals more about our collective inability to grapple with the complexity of modern identity than it does about Mamdani. Adams's response also reveals something troubling: a willful anti-intellectualism that refuses to engage with the extensive literature on race and identity that's been available for decades. Suppose he read books like Julia Lee's 2023 "Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian In Black And White America” or engaged with any pop culture on multicultural identity. In that case, he might understand that identity isn't a zero-sum game and rage isn't exclusive to Americans, Black and white.
But this isn't just about Adams. America often polices identities when they don't fit into our simplistic categories. Remember the assault on pronouns? Gender fluidity? Last year's uproar over South African singer Tyla? Critics questioned whether she could identify as "coloured," a problematic yet legitimate racial category in South Africa, because Americans couldn't process an identity that didn't translate neatly into our binary framework. For the record, I hated that unlike Pete Rock, or your favorite rapper's favorite Hotep rapper, she didn't identify as African.
For good reason. My own story illustrates this complexity. Born and raised in New York City, I am the daughter of South African and American Black parents, both radical Black internationalist intellectuals and activists, one South Africa’s second poet laureate. My name, Ipeleng, means "be proud" in Setswana. I spent decades thinking it meant "be happy," a misunderstanding that now also captures the broader confusion around identity (or is it, language?) in America.
When my father, a lifelong reader and writer, passed in 2018, he donated his extensive library to a South African university, lamenting that his children didn't appreciate reading. His gesture spoke to a generational and cultural divide that runs deeper than geography or taste. And explains why so many Americans, also Africans, including leaders, approach identity with such intellectual poverty.
I am grateful for the privilege of being a bridge in practically every aspect of my life, family included.
Last weekend, for example, our family welcomed a new member, a girl. My niece’s father is of South African and American descent. Her mother is Eritrean-American. And may or may not identify as such. I have a dream that by the time she's applying to college, our nation will have evolved beyond the kind of reductive thinking that treats identity as a multiple-choice question with only one correct answer.
Mamdani was born in Uganda. That makes him African. He grew up in New York. That makes him American. He's proud of both identities, just as former Vice President Kamala Harris proudly embraces her Blackness, as well as her Jamaican and Indian heritage. The suggestion that one must choose a single identity or justify one's complex background reveals the poverty of our collective cultural and racial imagination.
The real problem isn't that Mamdani checked multiple boxes. It's that we still think in terms of boxes at all, and that some of our leaders seem proud of their ignorance about the complexity of identity. Boxes are squares for collecting data, period.
As a Black American man, the son of Black American parents, he, like probably my parents, wouldn't understand the goofy conversations one has with oneself as a bicultural child filling out boxes as a teen and young adult. When Adams attacks Mamdani for claiming an African (pardon, African-American) identity, he's not just enforcing gatekeeping. He's demonstrating the kind of intellectual laziness that treats complex human experiences as simple political talking points.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about double consciousness over a hundred years ago. Today, juggling double and multiple identities isn't unique to the Black American experience. Neither is the emotional and spiritual degradation that often comes along with it.
As Black people, wrote Du Bois, double consciousness exists because of being looked at through the lens of one's Blackness and, at the same time, whiteness, a construct. The reason? From Du Bois in 1903 to Julia Lee in 2023, the ongoing legacy of white supremacy. We can either embrace this complexity or exhaust ourselves policing imaginary boundaries.
The human experience is nuanced and layered. If Mamdani wants to identify as both African and American—because he is both—that's his right. If he's proud of his Ugandan birth and his New York upbringing, that's not fraud. That's honesty about who he is.
Instead of debating whether Mamdani had the right to check certain boxes, we should be asking why we're still so invested in those boxes in the first place. In a city as diverse as New York, one can do better than force candidates—and the citizens of NYC—into categories that are as antiquated as the idea of a dollar slice for pizza.
The future belongs to people like my nephews and new niece, who will grow up knowing that identity isn't about checking the right boxes. It's about embracing the full complexity of who you are.
It's about being proud—Ipeleng—of all the parts that make you whole.
That's an inside job.
Not the role of surveys or applications—filled out for bureaucratic purposes with pen, paper, or a keyboard.