Ebony Q&A with Mayor Pete Buttigieg about his plans for communities of color

https://www.ebony.com/news/race-culture/mayor-pete-buttigieg-plans-communities-color/

Despite a crowded field of Democratic heavyweights for the 2020 presidential race, African-Americans should not dismiss candidate Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old married gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

With intelligence and thoughtfulness, Buttigieg talks concerns such as Black entrepreneurship and building trust between communities of color and law enforcement. He took a moment last week from his busy campaign and duties as mayor to talk with EBONY about reaching out to Black voters in South Carolina, and addressing the issues of neglected neighborhoods and reparations.

Reporter Jessica Floyd: What is your track record? What have you been able to do to lift the Black community?

Buttigieg: For us, it’s had a lot to do with entrepreneurship, making sure that we are supporting businesses that that can help be ladders of opportunity for people in our community. We just opened a new center in a historically African American neighborhood that we think will be able to play a role. We’re also thinking very intentionally about the city as a purchaser, and we’ve ordered up a disparity study that will allow us to eventually set goals when it comes to diversity with contracting.

We’re also making sure that we’re serving neighborhoods that have felt neglected and have often been neglected, often been on the short side of redlining. It’s one of the reasons why when we did a major investment in our parks and public spaces, we started with a huge investment in the Charles Black Center, which was in a neighborhood that had felt marginalized and left out.

We’ve also been very intentional about policing. I think for any mayor, diversity, building up trust between police departments and communities of color is vital. We have worked on efforts to do civil rights training, implicit bias training, as well as recruiting in minority communities to make sure that our department better reflects the community that it serves. We’ve been on a journey through a lot of these divisive issues that have affected different diverse communities and have especially touched Americans of color. We’ve felt that in our city.

I think I would not have been reelected with 80 percent of the vote and 78 percent in the primary, including winning all of the minority-majority districts in our city, if we hadn’t found a way to build bridges on these issues and really demonstrate that we wanted to build an inclusive community as well as an administration that’s served all well and address some of the inequities that have caused a lot of people to feel left out of the economic growth that is happening in our city, just as it has in our country.

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