Bloomberg needs to offer more explanation of record
It’s a good thing Michael Bloomberg is a billionaire.
Because the level of forgiveness and rebranding the former New York mayor is seeking doesn’t come cheap. And it shouldn’t come easy.
The high-spending Democratic presidential nominee, in the span of one week, has shown a capacity for patriarchal, simplistic thinking on race.
Will African American and Latino voters, two indispensable blocs of the Democratic voting base, forgive him?
In one instance, in a speech delivered in 2015, Bloomberg justified racial profiling through the discriminatory policing tactic of stop-and-frisk, which targeted black and Latino young men, with the disproven premise that they were of criminal mindset and carrying guns. In other newly resurfaced comments, from 2008, Bloomberg blamed the financial crisis on banks making risky loans to black Americans.
To be clear, Bloomberg’s comments deserve sustained scrutiny not just as racially insensitive, politically incorrect one-offs. These weren’t just cases of poorly chosen phrasing. Bloomberg, at least in these two examples, latched on to racial threads that aren’t supported by facts. Baked into policy, beliefs such as these are the very heartbeat of systemic racism.
As crisis control strategies go, Bloomberg surrogates are earning their keep.
They’re emphasizing his more positive support for racial and ethnic communities, pressed forward by a flood of advertising as the candidate gears up for Super Tuesday in early March. The hope is that Bloomberg can be seen not only as a loyal friend but also as an economic savior for African American families — and as a pugnacious adversary to President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg needs to address his remarks about African Americans and the 2008 financial crisis. At the time, Bloomberg discussed redlining, the practice of real estate agents and lenders refusing to show homes or make loans to African American buyers except within specific boundaries of cities. Once those discriminatory policies were challenged, banks and mortgage firms did an about-face. But some created a new scheme and began to target those communities, luring customers into loans they couldn’t afford, offering financing with escalating rates that soon went into default.
Those people were the victims of this scam. The lenders and others who devised the predatory lending schemes profited heavily. They were the instigators.
Bloomberg seemed to miss that crucial detail with his version, instead emphasizing the mortgage borrowers as unqualified, as if they caused the financial crisis. Banks, he said, “started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
To his credit, Bloomberg has apologized for stopand-frisk.
The peak of the practice came in 2011, while Bloomberg was mayor. That year, 685,000 people were stopped, according to New York Civil Liberties Union. Here’s the telling statistic: Nearly nine out of 10 stopped New Yorkers were innocent.
Even worse, Bloomberg’s comments show him beholden to the underlying racist mindset upon which the unconstitutional practice is based.
And now, Bloomberg is positioning himself as the savior?
To get there, to convince voters he is a changed man, he needs to do more than spend and say he’s sorry. He needs to explain his record, in longer conversations, with far more context and depth.