I've never lived in New York City. But I've always been pretty bullish on Andrew Yang. He strikes me as a generally thoughtful person and as the sort of politician who, if I do not exactly want to offer him my full-throated endorsement, I can at least imagine as a successful governor (in the literal sense of one-who-governs).
So I was disappointed to see his campaign (well, his wife, but there appears to be more to come) playing the "race" card on a cartoon that ran in the Daily News. Here's the story: the cartoon depicts Yang as a tourist. The criticism is clear: "Yang isn't a real New Yorker." That criticism seems pretty stupid to me. Yang has obviously spent a lot of his life in New York, and furthermore, New York is substantially a city of immigrants anyway. But creating the impression that Yang is a carpet-bagger has been his opposition's chosen tack, so, the cartoon seems like a pretty anodyne expression of that.
Evenlyn Yang, Andrew's wife, took to Twitter the totally reasonable and proportional take that this is a racial caricature on par with (or maybe worse than?) a buck-toothed guy named Chin-Kee saying "HARRO AMELLICA!"
There’s no shortage of progressive periodical calling Donald Trump a fake New Yorker and a tourist.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trump-tourist-trap
Donald Trump’s kind of obnoxiousness has always seemed to be atypical of New York values, and even, to put it bluntly, a kind of tourist trap for people from Texas who think his is anything like the real New York obnoxiousness.
It goes without saying, or should, that the New Yorkers issuing these judgments are invariably not-very-long-ago émigrés from elsewhere, whose roots are still in a small town in Jersey or a luncheonette in Kansas City or a farm in Ontario.
Donald Trump, an interloper whose spiritual home is someplace in midair, aboard that private jet—accompanied by his Slovenian-model wife
Can you believe that? Donald Trump married a foreigner. Disgusting. No real New Yorker would ever think of doing such a thing, according to the New Yorker. How much more irony can we attach to this, but that the anti-Slav writer is a Russian Jew named Adam Gopnik! Ouch. /u/Ilforte can perhaps tell us a proportional demographic breakdown of those responsible for the kulak Holocaust. Talk about sensitivity!
Anyway, enough about the Gopnik, what does Mehlman say in the Atlantic? Anything close to this?
And the truth is, Trump, the lifelong New Yorker, was never a New Yorker. He was a tourist.
Oh, well. Way too close to this.
What did Cuomo say about Trump?
I don’t believe he was a New Yorker, anyway,” he said. “Living in New York does not make you a New Yorker. To be a New Yorker is a state of mind. It’s a set of beliefs that you live by.
If they can write this stuff about Donald Trump, so synonymous with New York that he had a cameo in Home Alone, born and raised by a father raised in New York, whose name is writ large on the skyscrapers, then let us please have one comic about Yang’s California values. Just one, without being called racist by the “Asian Victory Alliance”, a totally normal name for a totally normal racial advocacy group.
Anyway, a bit more to the point,
Some bit of context I've missed?
Yes. Asian racial networks were given hundreds of millions of dollars to advocate racially last month. This is the fruit of their labor — or really, your labor, because the corporations we work for footed the bill.