Bluesky

Like various disgraced politicians before him, Andrew Cuomo has made a habit of periodically showing up at Black churches since he resigned from office, seeking absolution from audiences liable to be sympathetic to people tangled up in the legal system. (Usually those people are victims of racism, but we’ll get to that in a moment.) With New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a political death spiral and New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s approval numbers at painful lows, the ex-governor is road-testing a return to public life from the pulpit—proclaiming “God is great!”—in a not-so-surreptitious attempt to reclaim support from Black voters, who make up 25 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City. So it seems relevant to perhaps make something clear: Andrew Cuomo is not Black.

Exhibit A: He is white.

Some might say this is obvious.

This is certainly not a Rachel Dolezal situation; it’s more Blackfishing than blackface. We won’t have to track down his parents, for instance, only to discover a couple of low-profile white people living quietly in Montana. Cuomo’s parents are rather famously Italian and appeared nonstop in newspapers and television for several decades as white people. And although Hazel Dukes—who is Black and the president of the New York NAACP—did once refer to him as her son, even going so far as to say, “He ain’t white,” this is, empirically, not the case. Yes, Cuomo served in the administration of the man Toni Morrison figuratively described as “the first Black president,” but Bill Clinton is also verifiably white. White people can get terribly confused, so sometimes it helps to spell this stuff out. People like Congressman-elect George Latimer, who as Westchester County executive said that calls for the former governor’s resignation were comparable to the brutal murder of Emmett Till, in a quickly deleted Facebook post.

Cuomo himself has never* directly claimed to be Black, but he has often invoked the historical discrimination faced by immigrants from southern Italy, many of whom were racialized as people of color earlier in US history. Fact-check: This is true! To underscore the point, Cuomo even once helpfully read aloud from a newspaper article quoting 19th-century slurs such as “[N-word] wops,” bravely articulating the full word on live radio. His brother, Chris Cuomo, has explained that calling someone “Fredo,” an indignity he suffered, is “like the N-word for us”—the “us” being two white sons of a three-term governor of New York. Speaking of Mario, the late, great governor was a first-generation American who worked his way up from his father’s grocery store to the height of history. Yes, the OG Cuomo had to overcome bias. His eldest son, on the other hand, became a senior official in his administration at the age of 25 despite having no previous government experience. Can you spot the difference?

But wait, there’s more!

He’s rich, too.

OK, OK, public service doesn’t pay much unless you know how to monetize it—an equal-opportunity grift not limited to white people!—but that’s where Cuomo can really claim credit: The guy scored a $5 million book deal in the middle of a pandemic. Not that he’s spent much of it. He’s got the state covering his legal bills, currently adding up to $25.4 million, and he doesn’t appear to be paying crushing New York City rents. Since moving out of the governor’s mansion, he’s been crashing at his sister’s $22 million home in Westchester, where he’s currently registered to vote. Luckily, there are seven bedrooms, so he’s not sprawled out on the couch. Obviously, there are very rich Black people as well, so I acknowledge that this is perhaps the weakest point in my argument that Andrew Cuomo is white. It’s also true that not all white people are rich. Anthony Weiner was neither wealthy nor the son of privilege when he kicked off his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor at the Greater Springfield Memorial Church in Queens as an “imperfect messenger.”

*Remember when I said that the ex-governor has never actually claimed to be Black? That’s not exactly right. In 2017, he proudly declared, “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am Black. I am gay. I am disabled. I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices.” Of course, he didn’t mean any of this literally, but now seems as good a time as any to clarify that he is none of these things either. He’s also fond of claiming not to be “part of the political club”—but again, this should not be taken literally.

I suppose we have to seriously consider the possibility that Andrew Cuomo has “turned Black,” which Donald Trump informs us is a thing that can happen. Like Trump, Cuomo also doesn’t care for lifelong Black person and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom he has attacked repeatedly for doing her job. Incidentally, it’s the same job Cuomo had when he investigated Governor David Paterson, who is also openly Black. If we maintain that Cuomo has not stopped being white, this seems like a prime example of a double standard. Now he has claimed to be the victim of overzealous prosecutors—again, an appeal to the sympathies of Black audiences. However unfamiliar the experience may be to him, electively resigning from public office after an investigation that he authorized is not injustice. It’s just suffering the consequences of his own actions (an unusual experience indeed for extremely privileged white men), which include sexually harassing multiple women in his employ in violation of the state human rights law that he himself signed.

That’s certainly a tough pill to swallow. Maybe he should try prayer?