2020 Democratic presidential hopeful former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s past remarks keep resurfacing to haunt him.
The latest appeared in a PBS interview when he asserted that black and Latino males “don’t know how to behave in the workplace.”
PBS interviewed Bloomberg about Open Society Foundations, an initiative “to enhance employment among minorities.”
The idea sounds great and in all honesty, Bloomberg’s comments had some truth to it. But his phrasing was all off.
From Fox News (emphasis mine):
Speaking to PBS in the 2011 interview, Bloomberg noted that he had donated $30 million from his foundation to Open Society Foundations, the network established by liberal billionaire financier Goerge Soros, toward the new plan to enhance employment among minorities.Taxpayers and Soros himself contributed to the jobs initiative, which set up job recruitment centers in public housing projects, placed probation centers in “high-risk” areas, and linked black and Latino success in schools to Department of Education “progress reports.”“Well, for a long time, people have said there’s nothing you can do about it, but blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians. If you look at our jails, it’s predominantly minorities,” Bloomberg said in the interview.He added: “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. 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. And for many, many years, people said there’s just nothing you can do about it.”—“Nevertheless, there’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males, age, let’s say, 16 to 25,” Bloomberg said, “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.”—“There will be jobs, if we can get these kids – uh, get their families together, even if their fathers don’t live with their mothers, or have never been married, or even they’re in jail, get the fathers engaged,” Bloomberg added. “Lot of statistics show that if the father is engaged, it gives the kid some understanding that he’s heading down the wrong path – and assign mentors to them.”He went on: “A lot of these kids – it isn’t that they’re bad kids – it’s that once they’ve made a mistake, it’s very difficult to recover from that. But we have an obligation to them – if not for compassionate reasons, just for selfish reasons. Three-quarters of all kids in New York City that go to jail serve a period and come out, go right back to jail. Three-quarters of them. … We’ve just got to break that cycle.”
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