How Do You Self-Identify? For Many Americans, Checking a Box Won’t Do.

U.S.|How Do You Self-Identify? For Many Americans, Checking a Box Won’t Do.

Natalie Bishop was a little girl in Texas the first time she was asked to specify her race and ethnicity on an application. The daughter of a South Korean-born nurse and a white military veteran, she asked her mother what box to check on a form from school.

“My mom said check the ‘white’ box — it’ll give you more opportunities,” Ms. Bishop, a 38-year-old manufacturing engineer who now lives in Los Angeles, said with a laugh. But as she grew up, omitting the Asian half of herself felt wrong, she said, and even now, queries about her race still feel a little like trick questions.

“When the time comes for me to check a box,” she said, “I still ask: ‘What am I? What am I today?’”

Such questions have become more common as attempts by governments and institutions to capture the nation’s demographics have fallen out of sync with a population whose makeup increasingly defies longstanding labels.

Last week, racial identity and box-checking came up in New York, after Zohran Mamdani — the Democratic nominee for mayor, who is of Indian heritage and was born in Uganda — confirmed to The Times that, as a high school senior, he had identified himself on a Columbia University college application as “Asian” and “Black or African American” and also wrote in “Ugandan” on the form.

Some opponents sought to make political grist out of Mr. Mamdani’s choice on the form, pointing out that he is not Black and questioning whether he had tried to gain an unfair advantage in the university’s admissions process.

Mr. Mamdani, a state lawmaker from Queens who is a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda, denied trying to game the system and said he had simply sought to capture the complexities of his background. Both of his parents are Indian; his father’s family had lived in Uganda for decades, and Zohran Mamdani spent his early years there. The term African American has generally been used to describe Americans whose ancestors were from the Black racial groups of Africa.