Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D-N.Y.), is facing a new wave of controversy after a 2011 video of him emerged saying that “black and Latino males don’t know how to behave in the workplace,” according to Fox News.
Bloomberg has already been heavily criticized for comments in the past where he suggested that New York City’s successful “stop-and-frisk” policy was based largely on racial profiling. More recently, he claimed that it is not difficult to be a farmer, and also suggested that elderly people must be taken off their health care and allowed to die.
In the newly-unearthed comments, Bloomberg describes an “enormous cohort of black and Latino males” who “don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects,” and “don’t know how to behave in the workplace.” The comments were made in an interview with PBS, which was focusing on an effort by then-Mayor Bloomberg to “empower” minorities in the city of New York.
The increased scrutiny on Bloomberg comes as the mega-billionaire is surging in national polls for the Democratic presidential nomination. After joining the race late in November 2019, Bloomberg has taken the unusual strategy of skipping the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina), and instead has spent hundreds of millions of his own money on spending and campaign resources in the states that will be voting on March 3rd (otherwise known as “Super Tuesday”), including California and Texas.
Most recently, Bloomberg just narrowly qualified for the upcoming ninth Democratic primary debate, marking his first debate appearance of the election cycle. He will be one of six candidates on the stage, alongside former Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-Ind.), and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).