Mayor Pete Buttigieg called for a federal government built on affirmative action, not just equality.

“It will not be enough to replace racist systems and racist policies with neutral policies,” he said. “If we are not actively, pro-actively, yes, affirmatively reversing these harms, then my generation too will be held to account with our failure to control the system.”

Buttigieg said that President Donald Trump was practicing “peak white identity politics” in the White House in order to further divide Americans and it had to be replaced.

The South Bend Mayor discussed issues important to black Americans at the African American Leadership Summit hosted by the Democrat National Committee in Atlanta, Georgia.

He explained that as a white man, he had a bigger responsibility to the country.

“Because I am a man, it is twice as important that I be standing with women whose reproductive freedoms are at risk today,”

He said that as a citizen of the United States, he had a responsibility to help illegal immigrants in the country.

“Because I was born here, and have the paperwork to show it, it is twice as important that I stand up for Dreamers who are just as American as I am, but don’t have the documentation.”

He also said that it was twice as important to, as a white man, stand up for issues of racial justice.

“Yes, because I am white, it is twice as important that I stand up to inequality that is visited upon the heads of black Americans in our country today,” he said.