Michael Bloomberg’s disingenuous actions and pandering seems to know no bounds as he unabashedly does anything that he feels might secure the black vote. In his most recent episode, Bloomberg proposed a $70 billion plan to invest in the country’s “100 most disadvantaged neighborhoods” in an effort to create “1 million new black homeowners and 100,000 new black-owned businesses.”
According to The New York Daily News, the former New York City mayor made a speech at the site of the “Black Wall Street” massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Sunday, just one day before the observation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
During the Tulsa race riot, also referred to as the “Black Wall Street” massacre, white mobs destroyed the Tulsa business district and attacked Black residents, killing hundreds of people.
“The exploitation worked exactly as it was designed to — slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, segregation and redlining,” Bloomberg said in his speech. “For hundreds of years, America systematically stole black lives, black freedom and black labor. Well, it’s past time to say enough — and to damn well do something about it.”
According to Bloomberg’s campaign, his “Greenwood Initiative” will “help address the systemic bias that has kept many Black Americans from gaining wealth,” CNN reports. The newly proposed plan will supposedly call for “ending discriminatory business practices and biased policies in the financial, criminal justice and voting systems in America that have resulted in loss of wealth for African American families.”
Bloomberg’s track record as it pertains to advocating for Black and brown folks is essentially non-existent as he is the same person who enforced the aggressively racist “stop and frisk” policy, which encouraged the harassment of Black and brown New Yorkers because of the color of their skin.
The policy disproportionately affected Black and Latino men.
Bloomberg, who claimed “nobody asked” about “stop and frisk” before he announced his presidential run, apologized for the racist policy just before entering the race. Strategic? No. Sincere? Again, no.
“I didn’t understand that back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities,” he said. “I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know, good intentions aren’t good enough. Now, hindsight is 20/20. But, as crime continued to come down as we reduced stops, and as it continued to come down during the next administration, to its credit, I now see that we could and should have acted sooner and acted faster to cut the stops. I wish we had. I’m sorry that we didn’t. But, I can’t change history. However today, I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
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