Cuomo disgraced all Italian-Americans. Mamdani honored them in his closing.

Cuomo closed by demonizing immigrants, forgetting his own family history. Mamdani, in his closing video, lifted up the legacy of New York’s Italian-American political leaders who fought for workers.

New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Congressman Vito Marcantonio of East Harlem

As the New York mayor’s race came to a close, Andrew Cuomo ratcheted up racism and bigotry, embracing Islamophobia as he attacked Zohran Mamdani’s Muslim identity and faith.

Appearing on MAGA right-wing talk show host Sid Rosenberg’s program, Cuomo replied to Rosenberg’s grotesque claim Mamdani would “be cheering” if another 9/11 happened, by laughing and then stating, “That’s another problem.” Cuomo-aligned super PACs repeatedly ran racist ads, depicting Mamdani as dangerous because he’s Muslim.

It was on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business, however, where Cuomo and his host, both Italian-Americans, demonized Mamdani as an immigrant in ways their own families surely were treated when they came to this country. It was pretty stunning.

Whether it was about their grandparents or great-grandparents, Bartiromo and Cuomo surely know the stories of discrimination and hostility that lasted well into the early 20th century. They surely know that the earliest Italian-American immigrants were spit on, facing segregation and violence.

And yet, Bartiromo wondered how Mamdani, “is going to treat all of those people who are still in mourning from losing their lives? 3,000 people. I mean, all the first responders that we lost on 9-11.”

She continued:

I guess I’m wondering if you’re expecting New York to look more like London. You go to London right now and it is largely Muslim. Women are completely covered up.

Cuomo said that Mamdani is “out of sync with how New Yorkers feel,” even though New York is a city of immigrants and Mamdani is an immigrant.

“I just think he doesn’t get it. He’s dual citizenship,” Cuomo said. “He was a citizen of Uganda.”

It was breathtaking coming from people descended from a group that was once considered dirt in this country.

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As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brent Staples wrote in a New York Times piece in 2019, headlined, “How Italians Became “White’”:

Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people.

They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white nigger” and “nigger wop.”

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South. Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans. This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women and children across the South.

It was for that reason that Cuomo’s and Bartiromo’s conversation disgraced all Italian-Americans. These two certainly aren’t holding up the legacy of those Italian-Americans who pushed back against hate and also fought for the rights of workers, Jews, Latinos and many others.

But Mamdani is.

His closing video is remarkable, offering a history lesson and leaning in to the socialist polices of New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the lesser known East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

La Guardia is a storied, iconic mayor in New York’s history, a man born to Italian immigrants who served as mayor from 1934 to 1946. Marcantonio, a seven-term member of the U.S. House, is less known but no less impactful for workers, promoting social policies that helped millions.

As Mamdani explains in the video that has now gone viral, Marcantonio, La Guardia’s protégé—known simply as Marc to folks in East Harlem—was an “unapologetic socialist” who was a “steadfast ally to organized labor” and immigrant workers. He investigated worker abuses and fought in Congress for the rights of workers:

He provided English literacy lessons to thousands of newly-arriving immigrants, and he fought to expand Social Security to the countless domestic workers who’d been excluded. In the words of the great Dorothy Day, “the poor of East Harlem felt that he loved them and was interested in them”….

When he was called a radical, Marc responded, “If it be radicalism to believe that our natural resources should be used for the benefit of all and not for the purposes of enriching just a few, then I plead guilty to the charge.”

Watch the entire video. Mamdani gets his inspiration from those who fought for equality many decades ago in New York. Cuomo arrogantly forgets the roots of Italian-American immigrants and Italian-American politicians and activists who fought for other immigrants, while he trashes immigrants like Mamdani and many others.

Mamdani, however, is inspired by those very Italian-American politicians in history and celebrates their achievements. It should shame Cuomo—if he were still capable of feeling shame. This makes Mamdani not only a class act; he’s a politician who knows his history, and who wants to build on the legacy of those who made a difference in people’s lives.