Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is urging students to speak out against racial bias when they experience it, and he faults President Donald Trump for deepening the nation’s racial divide.

The South Bend mayor fielded a series of questions Thursday about race relations after encountering a group of students in Los Angeles while on a tour of a business that was co-founded by the late rapper Nipsey Hussle.

The apparently unplanned encounter with the group of mostly black students from the Midwest gave Buttigieg the opportunity to listen to their concerns about ongoing racial friction in cities and schools.

Buttigieg’s visit was squeezed in on a long day of fundraising — a typical pattern for presidential candidates in California, one of the nation’s fonts of campaign cash.

On Friday, Buttigieg addressed the National Urban League Conference in Indianapolis and told the crowd about his new proposal called the “Douglass Plan” which he described as a multi-pronged approach to tackle systematic racism in America.’

Buttigieg, of course, has been facing his own racial controversy here at home in the wake of the officer-involved shooting death of car break-in suspect Eric Logan, which has triggered outrage in the community, and frustration from police, who say the mayor hasn’t shown enough support for them.

Buttigieg also labeled President Trump a racist while speaking at the conference. He said, “My generation saw this country elect its first black president, and then turnaround and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.