New York Times Race-Polices Zohran Mamdani Using Stolen Property

Plus, Harvard steers Iranians toward weaker U.S. border checkpoints; Iraq smuggles Iranian oil

“African-American?” The Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, says he came from Uganda.

The Editors are no fans of Zohran Mamdani, to put it mildly. But we’re no fans of the New York Times, either. The Times scoop that when Mamdani applied to Columbia in 2009 he checked the “Black or African American” box on the application deserves more skeptical treatment than it has so far generally received.

First, it demonstrates breathtaking hypocrisy by the Times. When, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump questioned Kamala Harris’s racial self-identification, the Times attacked him for it. The Times called it “ugly” and “divisive.” Here is how the Times handled it in a news analysis subheadlined “White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.”:

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.

The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, it was hardly surprising. The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended.

The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.

And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.

“Give me a break,” said Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American who watched the discussion from the third row. “He seemed to be denigrating her background. She knows who she is.”

Yet now that it’s not President Trump doing the race-policing of Kamala Harris but the New York Times doing the race-policing of Zohran Mamdani, instead of being “incendiary,” “ugly,” or “divisive,” it’s just New York Times journalism. It’s almost like the Times has a double standard where it calls President Trump racist for doing things that the Times does itself. Either the Times owes Trump an apology or it owes Zohran Mamdani an apology, but any attempt to justify why Trump’s comment is really a lot worse than the Times article seems pretty strained. Maybe I am missing some fine distinction.

Second, the Times attributes its scoop to “internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.” Under Article 165 of New York state penal law, “A person is guilty of criminal possession of stolen property in the fifth degree when he knowingly possesses stolen property, with intent to benefit himself or a person other than an owner thereof.” Whether the “data” amount to “property” and whether the Times having it “shared with” amounts to “possession” are questions for lawyers, but beyond the legal questions is an ethical question of whether it’s right for the New York Times to knowingly use stolen property— “hack”— is a euphemism the Times uses to describe the crime of breaking into a computer system without authorization—to make profits for the New York Times.

Maybe the right move here of the New York Times isn’t to publish the stolen information but to return it to Mamdani or Columbia and call the police to report the cybercriminal. Sure, news organizations are generally in the business of sharing information with the public rather than assisting the police.

But imagine if someone hacked into the New York Times human resources computer system and obtained racial data on its job applicants from 2009. And then imagine that person showed up at, say, National Review or the New York Post and announced, “hey, I broke into the New York Times human resource computer system illegally, here are the racial boxes checked by successful and unsuccessful Times job applicants in 2009, with names attached, go publish a story based on that and sell ads and subscriptions against it.”

Most people are probably pretty clear that knowingly accepting, say, a stolen car and then using it to make money by operating it as an Uber is not okay. But when it’s information rather than a car that is stolen, somehow people don’t see it as clearly. Perhaps one difference is that the goal with the information is not solely profit but there is also some altruistic goal of informing the public about issues of genuine public policy concern. There may be some instances where the end of informing the public about a matter of grave and urgent concern justifies the means of knowingly accepting stolen property, but it isn’t entirely clear to me that Mamdani’s race box for a 2009 unsuccessful college application is one of those instances.

Frequently, the person who steals the information puts it in a plain white envelope and mails it to the newsroom, giving the newsroom the ability, at least ostensibly, to contend that it does not know the information was actually stolen. That doesn’t appear to be the case in this particular example, where the Times concedes that the information was hacked.

Harvard steers Iranians toward weaker U.S. border checkpoints: