Being a descendant of Italian heritage on both sides of my family, I find it disheartening to suspect our mayor may not hold Italy—or its people—in high regard.
Unsurprisingly, the same individual who once displayed contempt for a Columbus statue during his radical activism days has now introduced a controversial map of New York City. This map seemingly erases any representation of Italian communities, ignoring well-known areas like Arthur Avenue, Little Italy, and Staten Island.
I cannot pinpoint what exactly occupies Zohran Mamdani’s thoughts.
Perhaps he was never able to secure a reservation at the coveted Rao’s restaurant before his tenure as mayor, or maybe a disappointing slice of pizza led to this perspective.
Nonetheless, I believe the root of his indifference toward individuals like myself is more nuanced than mere ethnic bias.
It involves his broader worldview, something called cultural Marxism, which defines the Italian American experience here in New York and elsewhere as a lie.
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Yes I know, the Marxism usually associated with our mayor is of the economic variety: demonizing the rich, government-owned grocery stores, free buses, higher taxes to provide more welfare support to migrants here legally or illegally.
He boasts about replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Go deeper into what makes Mamdani tick — his past musings about wealth, the radicals he’s appointed to various positions, his academic training in Africana Studies and his far-leftist, critical-theorist Columbia professor father, Mahmood Mamdani — and you’ll understand that collectivism is only part of what animates our mayor.
He holds a worldview that divides Americans into tribes based not on Marx’s classic interpretation (which would be class), but on race.
Under the theory of cultural Marxism, all things are oppressor versus oppressed.
It ignores swaths of history in favor of grievance against Western civilization — the ultimate oppressor of the Third World, the historically oppressed.
Hence you have one mayoral appointee calling homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” that the government should seize.
Another, his chief equity officer no less, mused on social media about her disdain for white liberal women (they apparently can’t overcome their whiteness) and how government should “tax these people to the white meat.”
The mayor’s wife apparently believed that the Oct. 7 massacre of innocent Israelis involved a “mass rape hoax.”
The mayor himself has never disavowed “globalize the intifada,” the rallying cry of cultural Marxism that aims at wiping Israel off the map.
How have Italians — particularly most Italian Americans, who descend from an economically backward area of Europe — or Jews — who have faced centuries of persecution — fallen afoul of this ideology?
For Jews it’s the success of Israel, both economically and in defending itself against decades of invasions and terrorism from the allegedly oppressed people the cultural Marxists say need defending.
For Italians, I think the lefty beef comes from a different place: anger that they never fell for the oppression narrative.
Most came here from the impoverished south of Italy, the Mezzogiorno region, around the turn of the last century.
They were offered no welfare (or Obamacare) and they weren’t considered “white” by the standards of the time.
Consider the background of Yankee great Yogi Berra, who grew up in the Italian enclave of St. Louis known as “Dago Hill.”
When his parents came to America, George Will wrote in Berra’s obituary, “an 1895 advertisement seeking labor to build a New York reservoir said whites would be paid $1.30 to $1.50 a day, ‘colored’ workers $1.25 to $1.40, and Italians $1.15 to $1.25.”
But they prospered nonetheless.
My grandfather and uncles helped build the city subway system.
Years later, my father gained entry to the very union that had denied membership to my grandfather because of the vowel at the end of our name.
My paternal grandfather grew up in the Italian-American ghetto known as East Harlem, my mom’s side in Little Italy, my parents in Bronx.
They were poor Italian neighborhoods that became working class (left off Mamdani’s map, of course) not just because of preference, but also because of redlining.
Yet we all became “Americans” — and were better off for it.
My father served in the Marines, went to trade school and saved to own a home.
I went to graduate school; my brother is an MD and PhD who runs a New York City hospital.
DEI didn’t aid our ascent.
If you rewrite that history of Italian-Americans, if you cleanse their story from the history books, you can start a whole new one from the ashes,
That’s what the cultural Marxists are aiming for. Don’t let them.
