While promoting a $127 million, three-year initiative to help minorities in the workplace in 2011, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that there’s “this enormous cohort of black and Latino males” who “don’t know how to behave in the workplace” and “don’t have any prospects.”
The head-turning comments in a resurfaced interview were just the latest headache for the multibillionaire’s campaign. In the past week, Bloomberg has been confronted with his previous claims that farming doesn’t take much intelligence and that “anybody” could do it, as well as his insistence that the way to get guns “out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.” Additionally, Bloomberg has taken heat for suggesting that a functioning health care system must let the elderly die.
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.
“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.” – READ MORE
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