Michael Bloomberg’s Candidacy is a Slap in the Face to Black America

There are no two ways around it, Michael Bloomberg was the leader of a Jim Crow-esque regime during his time as mayor of New York City. Reminiscent of the vagrancy laws that were so central to the reaffirmed racial and economic order of the post-Reconstruction South, Stop and Frisk represents a violation of Black person-hood and liberty that has the express intent of stifling progress and keeping victimized populations readily exploitable.

In the same way those vagrancy laws kept countless impoverished Black men and women locked into the sharecropping and convict-leasing systems that were all too reminiscent of chattel slavery, Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk policy was part of a network of systems that still keeps countless impoverished Black people locked into a cycle of constant contact with a criminal “justice” system that means them nothing but harm.

With well over 80% of Stop and Frisk victims being Black and Hispanic people, Bloomberg’s campaign of harassment, terror and criminalization against Blacks and Hispanics in New York City should be a disqualifying offense in the mind of anyone who cares about human dignity and personal liberty. And just in case anyone is under the assumption that Bloomberg regrets the part he played in implementing that odious policy, as recently as 2015 Bloomberg made comments defending the policy at an Aspen institute event saying things like:

“Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is,” and “They are male minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city,…And that’s where the real crime is.”

To follow up with Bloomberg’s line of thought in that quote, there is something that is *actually* true of virtually every city, and that’s the reality of racialized residential segregation. One of the greatest historical drivers of residential segregation (and the concentrated poverty and social ills that stem from it) was the policy of redlining. Historian Richard Rothstein explains redlining in his authoritative 2017 book on residential segregation “The Color of Law” writing that:

“The HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.”

Neighborhoods that were colored red were given no access to the dirt cheap mortgage credit that built the white American middle class. This meant that Black communities saw whatever wealth they had drained through high-cost lenders (and predatory real estate agents and landlords) who understood that the lack of access to low-cost credit and the ubiquity of housing discrimination created a desperate situation for Black home-buyers and renters. UC Irvine law professor and banking expert Mehrsa Baradaran drives this point home in her 2017 book “The Color of Money” saying, “These agencies (like the HOLC, FHA and FDIC)…created a robust homeowning, capital-creating, and predominantly white middle class. They also made the black ghetto a permanent feature of the twentieth century.”

With this information laid bare, it is important to see what Michael Bloomberg has publicly said about redlining to give further context to his championing of stop and frisk. In 2008 Michael Bloomberg blamed the Great Recession on the abolition of redlining commenting, “It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,…Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.”

Bloomberg manages to tell two lies in order to defend an explicitly racist policy (surprise, surprise!), the first being that the crash was caused by banks feeling “pressured to make loans to everyone”, when the truth is that Wall street was allowed to make excessive profits selling horribly risky mortgages due to essentially non-existent regulation standards. The second lie is Bloomberg pretending that redlining was not an explicitly racialized policy. In fact, he whitewashes the horror of it to the point where an uninformed person may feel as though the policy (and by extension, Bloomberg) is reasonable.

Now, the point of taking a detour away from stop and frisk to talk about Bloomberg’s defense of redlining is because the two are intimately connected. Concerning Black and brown communities that have historically been the site of plunder, hyper-exploitation and complete marginalization away from the mainstream society, this country has always opted to keep a boot on their throats instead of offering them a hand up. Michael Bloomberg’s solution to the numerous challenges our poor communities of color face was not to meet their material needs and broaden the horizons of the people in those neighborhoods, but it was to keep those people mired in their conditions by harassing, assaulting and criminalizing them.

Michael Bloomberg has been a career-long enemy of Black and brown people both at home and abroad, and him winning the nomination would be even more dejecting than Trump’s victory in 2016. If morality, decency, and common sense have any role to play in the 2020 election, then Bloomberg will flame out soon. But his rapid climb up the polls and his ability to simply buy support and visibility reminds us of a terrible feature of American politics: a presidential candidate having a clear disregard (if not disdain) for poor Black and brown people is acceptable for many Americans if the end result is a return to a perceived sense of “normalcy”.

At previous points of internal crisis in American history, supposed allies of the Black community abandoned Reconstruction (dooming Blacks to Jim Crow for nearly 100 years), and refused to enforce the legal protections gained during the Civil Rights era so that people with the least to lose could remain the most comfortable. Bloomberg’s candidacy represents yet another example of the American willingness to throw Black people under the bus in order to be inoculated against having to display a basic sense of morality by working to move the country forward. Any American “reunion” that is achieved by electing someone like Bloomberg is one that we should not want any parts of, and it is one that history will shame us for if we allow it to happen.