Pete Buttigieg Lectures ‘Comfortable’ White Liberals on Race

Mayor Pete Buttigieg was visibly distraught Thursday after a visit with students at Vector90, a working space in Los Angeles for young people.

A few of the students told Buttigieg that they struggled in their school with other students using racial slurs and saying negative things about other cultures.

Speaking to the media afterward, Buttigieg said he was angry about what he had heard, noting one student said he was hearing the “n-word” in school.

“How can you listen to that and not realize just how much trouble we’re in?” he asked reporters.

Buttigieg indicated that he spoke with students from Noblesville, Indiana and Racine, Wisconsin and said they were not “diverse communities.”

“It is a reminder that racism, especially of that type, is not a black problem, it is a white problem,” he said. “And white America needs to be having a conversation with itself, about what kind of atmosphere is being created for kids to grow in.

Buttigieg challenged white liberals to realize that the problems with racism in the modern era was real.

“Frankly a lot of white liberals who are maybe a little too comfortable about how far we’ve come as a country need to know that people are being called racial slurs to their faces in high schools in America in 2019,” he said, angrily calling the incidents “b.s.”

The South Bend mayor blamed President Donald Trump for making racism worse.

“Obviously we’ve got a president who is making it worse, but let’s not pretend that the president invented this problem or that it will go away when we beat him,” he said. “This is a society-wide issue.”

Vector 90 was co-founded by Nipsey Hussle, a rapper who was shot and killed in the Los Angeles community that he worked to improve. The Los Angeles Police Department had an open investigation into Hussle for gang activity that occurred on the property, according to the New York Times.

Buttigieg visited the workspace in between fundraisers in Los Angeles.