Michael Bloomberg is under rigorous criticism thanks to his problematic comments on race in the past.
His 2011 interview with PBS resurfaced recently, where he said that Black and Latino males do not know how to find jobs.
The billionaire and a 2020 Presidential hopeful said this while he was serving a third term as New York City Mayor, while attempting to gain support for an initiative to improve employment opportunities for young men.
In this interview, he said, ““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 skill sets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.point 442 |
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He also emphasized that Black and Latinos score terribly in school testing and make up the majority of incarcerated in jails.
These remarks are similar to one he made during a private speech in 2015, which also made the headlines last week after an audio was leaked via Twitter.
The speech aggressively campaigned his controversial stop-and-frisk policy, and that he plans to put all the cops in minority neighborhoods to end gun violence.
He pointed out that ninety-five percent of both murder suspects and victims fit one M.O – male, minorities, and ages between 16 – 25 years old.
Another discriminatory policy he enforced during his tenure as the New York City Mayor was the “Demographics Unit.”
The said unit mapped our Muslim American communities and spied on everything related to anything Muslim – from kebab shops to student’s whitewater rafting trips.
Not only did the surveillance failed to generate a single terror lead, the entire program offended American values.
Bloomberg apologized for his remarks, stating in his tweet, “This issue and my comments about it do not reflect my commitment to criminal justice reform and racial equity.”