Mamdani, Race, and Survey Design
Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer.
Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City, and despite being very popular among voters, his candidacy is upsetting many rich and powerful people.
One such example is the New York Times, who on July 4 2024, ran a hit piece on Mamdani “revealing” that he identified as “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his college admission paperwork. The NYTimes’ source for this information was a notorious white supremacist, who had obtained the information from hacked Columbia University admissions data. That alone is should discredit the story, but the actual fact is that Mamdani is both Asian and African American. At least for some definitions of the terms.
He was born in Uganda to a Ugandan-Indian father and an Indian mother. The Indian diaspora in Uganda has a long and turbulent history, many of their ancestors having arrived as indentured workers recruited by the British beginning in 1895 to build railways in what turned out to be extremely harsh and dangerous conditions. The 2023 novel A History of Burning by Janika Oza is an excellent read about this.
Okay but what does any of this have to do with epidemiology or public health? At the core of this controversy is a problem that epidemiologists (and many other scientists) frequently face: information bias.
Information bias covers all the ways the data you collect don’t match the data that you wanted to collect. This can include everything from simple errors (for example, accidentally typing a 0 instead of a 9), to more complicated issues like social desirability bias, which can happen when people are uncomfortable talking about socially un-desirable activities.
In the case of Mamdani, the type of information bias is response bias. This bias arises when the question used to solicit information can be interpreted in multiple ways, so that the answers you receive don’t always mean the same thing.
To Mamdani (and for many people), questions about race and ethnicity clearly had complicated multi-facetted answers that draw on history and culture as much as anything else. To the white supremacist NYT tipster, Mamdani’s race and ethnicity is a simple visual description: he looks South Asian, therefore he is South Asian, end of story.
But what question was the Columbia University form actually trying to ask: “what do you consider your race/ethnicity to be?” or “what would a random person on the street assume your race/ethnicity is?”. These are two very different questions for a lot of people.
But even when you clarify that the question is “what do you consider your race/ethnicity to be”, there’s still potential information bias that can arise from forcing people to choose among a fixed set of options. For example, Mamdani didn’t have the option to choose an “Indo-African American” box but if there had been one, he might have chosen it.
A similar difficulty arises for Middle Eastern & North African (MENA) individuals1. This group includes people of Arab descent but has historically not been included on surveys like the US Census. Instead, since the 1940s, MENA and Arab-American individuals have been instructed to select “white” on official paperwork. The result is that, despite experiencing high levels of xenophobia and discrimination, and a high risk of hate crimes, we have very little actual data on the health and well-being of Arab-American and MENA individuals. Because you can’t study data that you don’t collect.
For the person answering the survey, it boils down to this: If there’s no box that accurately defines your situation, what option should you select?
For those of us trying to make sense of survey data, the bottom line is we can’t understand the data without understanding the survey: what questions were asked, what answer options were available, and how did the respondents interpret the questions and answers.
As an independent epidemiologist, I make my living entirely through reader support. Readers like you make E is for Epi possible. If you find value in this work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
For more on the issue of MENA / Arab-American racial and ethnic data collection, check out the work of the brilliant Dr Nadia Abuelezam: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jJu6TEkAAAAJ&hl=en
As a survey designer, this post really resonated. As a person trying to understand humans, and especially the history of race definitions and origins, this resonated even more. Great post. This is also why Woke in its original form is important, as isC RT
I am really glad someone flagged your post so that I saw it (and as you spotted, I restacked it). You did a brilliant job of dissecting that stupid Times article, and into the bargain pointed out what appears to me to be a common problem in survey design. As a side issue on what data/survey results show: in the case of Mamdani, I think that the primary election results are actually quite complicated. I am too often seeing what I believe to be over-broad lessons drawn from them, which, as a resident of NYC, concern me. For example, whereas it is sometimes assumed that it’s mostly the well-to-do who broke for Cuomo over Mamdani, it is often overlooked that the lowest income voters and Black voters broke for Cuomo, too. It’s also important to recognize that only under 30% of eligible voters voted in the Democratic primary. So, while there is no question in my mind but that Mamdani ran an excellent campaign, I myself am not at all sure what is fair to draw from this vote even in terms of Democratic voter concerns and preferences. I think the city itself, while overwhelmingly Democratic, is nonetheless very divided, and I worry what this portends for the general election and beyond.