There doesn’t appear to be a shortage of past racist statements from Michael Bloomberg. As the former New York City mayor buys his way up the Democratic primary polling, these statements keep coming out—and no wonder, because Bloomberg didn’t spend the first 15 years of the 2000s saying racist stuff in private; he spent those years saying racist stuff in public, under the guise of serious policy discussion.
Following his horrific comments about stop and frisk, we now learn Bloomberg’s deep (racist) thoughts on redlining, the practice whereby lenders would not give mortgages, or would only offer extremely expensive ones, to people buying homes in “hazardous,” aka black, neighborhoods. Though the policy was officially abandoned decades ago, it continues to cause harm. But to Bloomberg, the problem came with the end of redlining—and that caused the 2008 economic collapse.
“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 said in September 2008. ”And then Congress got involved—local elected officials, as well—and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
This is not what happened. What happened was that, as one racial and economic justice advocate told the Associated Press, “the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color. People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”
What happened was that banks pushed subprime loans on black families that could have afforded safer, lower-interest prime loans. Bloomberg’s explanation that the end of redlining meant that people with poor credit got loans they shouldn’t have been able to get absolves the entire U.S. financial system of responsibility for first creating massive wealth disparities through redlining and then targeting black people with subprime loans for greater profit.
Bloomberg’s campaign is now trying to spin this. “He’s saying that something bad—the financial crisis—followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor,” according to a spokesperson. Uh huh. Just sort of coincidentally followed. He wasn’t saying there was a problem, just, you know … stuff happened.
As a Democratic presidential candidate, Bloomberg now has a plan to “help a million more Black families buy a house, and counteract the effects of redlining and the subprime mortgage crisis,” according to his spokesperson. He also needs to have a clear statement that it was banks that started the financial crisis and that everything we’re looking at here is the legacy of racist policies that targeted black families and prevented them from amassing the wealth that white families were helped into.
Bloomberg’s campaign might also want to try to get ahead of whatever highly public racist statement he made not so very long ago that some reporter is probably right this minute digging up.