In “Pretend It’s a City,” Martin Scorsese’s Netflix docuseries, Fran Lebowitz burnishes her image as the quintessential New Yorker.Photograph courtesy Netflix Afew days ago, my sister called me up to resolve a dispute between her and her fiancé. “Can you say that you’re a real New Yorker if you didn’t grow up in New York?” she asked. We were both born and raised in Manhattan; her fiancé, a military brat, grew up in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere. The debate had started, as these subjects often do, with linguistics: she says “on line”; he says “in line.” I told her about the oft-invoked ten-year rule, which would make her fiancé an official New Yorker this September. Still, she thought, he seemed intractably Pacific: sandy-haired, serene, works in tech. “You don’t get to claim the throne if you’re not really from here,” she insisted. Of course you can, I said. Lots of people move here and become New Yorkers—including our parents. As consolation, I assured her, she would always be a New Yorker, even if she moved away. Not that she has any plans to. Every place has its own form of nativism, its own smell test. Sara Gideon lost her Senate run in Maine against Susan Collins in part because she was deemed “from away,” having moved to the state in 2004. The Internet spent much of the holidays dissecting Hilaria Baldwin’s claim to Spanish identity—she had spent time in Spain during her childhood but was born in Boston, a city with its own sky-high bar to entry. (A Facebook friend from Massachusetts recently railed against the “horrible” Boston accents in the film “Pieces of a Woman,” to which a commenter replied, “No film should take place in Boston because no film has EVER gotten the accent right.”) But New York’s regional snobberies are particular, and particularly onerous. You have to make it at least ten years, the thinking goes, to prove that you won’t wimp out. To be a New Yorker is to have suffered and stayed anyway. Complaining—about apartment size, about the subway—is our compensation, and our I.D. badge. Even then, the goalposts move: Can an “in line” person really be a New Yorker? Lately, the question of New York authenticity has clung to two of our prominent denizens, Andrew Yang and Fran Lebowitz. Last week, Yang, the entrepreneur and former Presidential candidate, announced his run for mayor with a video directed by Darren Aronofsky (Brooklyn boy). Yang, who was born in Schenectady and grew up in Westchester, explains that he “moved to Morningside Heights” in 1996, meaning that he went to Columbia Law School. He strolls through Coney Island, grabs a slice of pizza, ribs the Knicks, and debates the superiority of Gray’s Papaya versus Papaya King with his wife, Evelyn. (“Gray’s Papaya,” he answers, confidently.) But Yang’s rollout immediately tripped over a series of authenticity tests. A Times piece pointed out that he has never voted in a New York mayoral election, and that he has spent most of the pandemic not at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment but at his weekend house, in New Paltz, or (horrors!) campaigning for Democrats in Pennsylvania and Georgia. “Is he a New Yorker? I don’t even know,” one business leader said. Andrew Yang standing at a subway stop Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Presidential candidate, announced his run for mayor with a video directed by Darren Aronofsky.Source: Andrew Yang / YouTube Eyebrows were raised. Then, last Friday, Yang posted a video of himself shopping at what he described as a bodega. “Can you imagine a New York City without bodegas?” he said, after buying green tea and bananas and elbow-bumping a passerby. But the store, a Yemeni-owned establishment in midtown, looked suspiciously sleek and spacious, prompting an outraged discourse over what counts as a bodega, a deli, or a grocery store. Stung by Bodegagate, Yang spent the rest of the weekend on a social-media authenticity blitz: sampling pickles on the Lower East Side, riding down a bike lane (“this is my commute”), visiting a food pantry in Flushing. “I’m learning a lot about my city,” he tweeted on Saturday.