More and more racist comments made by presidential candidate and former mayor of New York City Mike Bloomberg are coming back to haunt him. Now comes proof that in 2011, Bloomberg claimed that Black and Latino men don’t have office etiquette.
Bloomberg made the comments to PBS while he was promoting a multimillion-dollar Young Men’s Initiative during his term as NYC mayor.
Bloomberg said “enormous cohorts” of young Black and Latino men “don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”
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The remarks were said while he was being interviewed by PBS Newshour. Bloomberg was promoting his Young Men’s Initiative, a $127 million, three-year program funded in part by Bloomberg’s charitable organization, financier George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the city of New York.
During the interview, he said: “Blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians. If you look at our jails, it’s predominantly minorities.
“If you look at where crime takes place, it’s in minority neighborhoods. If you look at who the victims and the perpetrators are, it’s virtually all minorities,” Bloomberg said. “This is something that has gone on for a long time, I assume it’s prevalent elsewhere but it’s certainly true in New York City.”
He added: “But nevertheless, there’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males, age, let’s say, 16 to 25, “that don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know what their skillsets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”
The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to a request from Vice for comment.
Still, Bloomberg has a history of making racist comments. Just recently, he apologized for remarks he made in 2015 in which he defended the New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy during his administration. He said that more cops were placed in Black and Latino neighborhoods “because that’s where all the crime is” and that “the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”
Bloomberg apologized during a recent campaign stop in Houston. “I defended it, looking back, for too long because I didn’t understand then the unintended pain it was causing to young Black and brown families and their kids.
“I should have acted sooner and faster to stop it. I didn’t, and for that I apologize.”
The apology astonished some observers, New York Times reported. “It is almost unheard-of for a former chief executive to renounce and apologize for a signature policy that helped define a political legacy.”
The fallout on neighborhoods from “stop and frisk” is still felt to this day, and Bloomberg’s support for it is seen as one of his biggest potential vulnerabilities in 2020.
“You can’t expect people like us to forgive and forget after one speech,” Rev. Al Sharpton told Bloomberg. Sharpton called out Bloomberg over stop-and-frisk while Bloomberg was mayor.
