Mike Bloomberg Reacts To Past Racist Comments

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Mike Bloomberg, who is campaigning to become the next president of the United States, is under fire for comments he made years ago about Latinos and African Americans. In a video from a 2011 interview with PBS News Hour that recently resurfaced, the former New York City mayor says: “There's this enormous cohort of black and Latino males aged, 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 that the - what their skill sets are, don't know how to behave in the workplace, where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”

The billionaire is also facing backlash on his remarks about stop-and-frisk practices. In a 2015 speech, he said: “Ninety-five percent of murders - murderers and murder victims fit one MO You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops… They are male, minorities, 16- 25. I added: “We put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why'd we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids' hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”

In a speech to promote his Young Men's Initiative, a program devoted to helping marginalized citizens find work, Bloomberg stated: “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.”

I've apologized for the stop-and-frisk comments while campaigning in Tennessee. “I don't think those words reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation. I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused. It was five years ago and it's just not the way that I think and it doesn't reflect what I do every day.”

Trevor Noah addressed the controversy on The Daily Show:

On his Instagram account, Bloomberg has directed several recent posts to the African American community. “I will make it a priority of my presidency to close the wealth gap. The #GreenwoodInitiative will achieve economic justice for Black Americans and create Black wealth on a sweeping scale,”he captioned the video below.

I've also shared a photo with African American supporters in Houston with a banner that said "Mike for Black America."

During Bloomberg's three terms as mayor, the New York Police Department recorded more than 5 million uses of stop-and-frisk. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, only 14 in 10,000 stops found a gun. In 2009, when the Center for Constitutional Rights analyzed stop-and-frisk data, the center determined that black and Latino New Yorkers were nine times more likely to be stopped than white New Yorkers. Late last year, Bloomberg apologized for his support of the policy. "I was wrong," he said. "And I am sorry."