CNN host Chris Cuomo was mocked online after he claimed the name “Fredo” was the equivalent of “the N-Word” during a confrontation with a heckler.
The filmed run-in was posted to Twitter on Monday and went viral quickly, depicting Cuomo yelling angrily at a man after he had called him “Fredo” — a reference to Fredo Corleone, the weak brother of the Corleone crime family in “The Godfather.”
Cuomo claimed that using the name “Fredo” as an insult was “disparaging” to Italians and that the name was the equivalent of “the N-word” to African-Americans.
Did @ChrisCuomo just say that “Fredo” is to Italians what the N word is to black people? Th N word is a dehumanizing word used against blacks who endured years of oppression. Fredo is a term from The Godfather, referring to the dumb brother. Equivocating the two is pure racism.
— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) August 13, 2019
As Oprah always reminds us, the n-word is the last thing black men heard before they were strung up from a tree or when black women were raped. Nothing is comparable to the n-word.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 13, 2019
So @ChrisCuomo says that “Fredo”— a character on The Godfather— is the same as the n-word? Equating the two is the very definition of white privilege and diminishes the generations of hate African Americans have had to endure. https://t.co/vbwIAran9S
— Steven Cheung (@CaliforniaPanda) August 13, 2019
“Punk ass b*tches from the right call me ‘Fredo.’ My name is Chris Cuomo, I’m an anchor on CNN,” said the CNN host before threatening to throw the man “down these stairs like a f***ing punk” and that Cuomo would “f***ing wreck his s**t.” – READ MORE