This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Right now, we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is. They don’t know, they don’t know these things.” —New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, during a Monday interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference
If recent polling is any indication, it seems pretty clear to everyone that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul could be doing a better job of running her state. If I may offer a little advice, maybe she could start by understanding New York City a little better—and by being just a biiiiiiit less racist.
Our setting for Hochul’s latest offense is the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, where the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference kicked off on Monday. This year, the dayslong “Davos of North America” has brought together a wide range of prominent voices (government bureaucrats, business executives, internet trolls, etc.) to address the theme of “Shaping a Shared Future”—meaning, per the institute’s website, an opportunity to “unite our catalytic community to tackle” pressing global issues like regional warfare, climate change, and artificial intelligence, and to “make strides toward a world where our combined efforts yield transformative results.”
Pretty classic pablum from the think tank started by Michael Milken, who’s perhaps best known for turbocharging innovations in securities fraud that earned him a government-imposed lifetime ban from the industry and a brief prison sentence back in the 1990s. (President Donald Trump, whose treasonous administration members continue to be welcome conference participants, would later pardon him in 2020.) Milken’s longtime post-prison gig—chairing this eponymous institute and collecting a bunch of powerful rich people to talk about, like, Living in a Society—has generated plenty of controversy over the decades, between the institute’s sketchy “research,” the right-wing moguls who received plenty of Milken money and then advocated for his pardon, and the conference affiliates who’ve simped on behalf of modern-day villains like the Carlyle Group and Elon Musk.
It seems apt, then, that Kathy Hochul’s gaffe occurred against this backdrop, as she flew from her home state to California in order to highlight New York’s “Empire A.I. Consortium,” a $400 million state-led initiative that Hochul hopes will “make New York the next Silicon Valley,” per WXXI News. In a Day One Milken conference chat with newscaster Jonathan Capehart, Hochul “explained her desire to make technology more widely accessible, especially in low-income communities,” according to the New York Times. It was while she breathlessly touted spending “the money to build a phenomenal supercomputer,” something that “no other state has done,” that she harped on New York’s opportunity to be “the best” and then stumbled into her unfortunate remark, as recorded by Gothamist’s Jon Campbell:
Maybe, you might be thinking, her comments were taken out of context. But even in the full paragraph, I’m not sure that what she said looks all that much better. It seems pretty clear Hochul is unaware that the Bronx is home to literal hundreds of high-achieving public and specialty schools, including a nationally ranked High School of Science. She doesn’t appear to think that “young Black kids” from the borough that birthed the globally dominant music genre known as hip-hop would possess any literacy or vocabulary, forget any actual technological prowess with recording studios and music-production apps. Maybe most insulting of all, the most she seems to actually know about these kids is that they supposedly have “diverse voices.”
There was no pushback to Hochul’s comment in the moment, whether from Capehart himself (who is Black) or from conference attendees. After several Bronx lawmakers expressed their understandable anger, the governor did say she regretted it, writing in a media statement Monday evening that she “misspoke”: “Of course Black children in the Bronx know what computers are—the problem is that they too often lack access to the technology needed to get on track to high-paying jobs in emerging industries like A.I.”
Sure, but it doesn’t seem like Hochul actually cares much about what the Bronx’s Black children get to access, considering that she’d proposed education funding cuts in the very same state budget that funded her prized supercomputer. (She walked those back following widespread backlash, naturally.) Hochul certainly doesn’t seem to care about educational resources at the municipal level, either, considering how many cuts Mayor Eric Adams is still trying to make to New York City’s education budget. The “law and order”–focused city leader would also prefer to splurge more money on A.I. instead of schools, including an official-services chatbot that misrepresents local NYC regulations and straight-up tells its users to break the law. I’m sure Bronx schoolchildren love hearing that their government wants to increase their “access” to the technology of the future by gutting their classrooms and boosting malfunctioning computers.
Incidentally, Hochul did find a defender in Adams, who claimed to “know the Governor’s heart” and said he wasn’t going to act like “the word police” when it came to her statements. Hey, we finally found a cop Eric Adams doesn’t love!
