For the first time in decades, Chicagoans have a real choice between mayoral candidates: There’s Paul Vallas who has spent his entire career decimating public education and services, and there’s Brandon Johnson, whose experience rooted in Chicago as a teacher and savvy organiser has been about shoring up and fighting for more services for all.
I don’t write this as a cheerleader for Johnson (I’m unused to writing in favour of political candidates, so any inadvertent cheeriness on my part is purely a testament to my inexperience). I am an instrumentalist about politicians: they’re not our friends or comrades, and I work towards a world where they no longer exist. We can’t trust politicians. We can only trust ourselves to make them do what we want, without sentimentality or devotion.
I have no interest in detailing the virtues of Brandon Johnson—plenty of people are doing that (and for more on the race in general, you should look at Stephanie Skora’s “Girl, I Guess” voter guide). I cannot, for a hundred different reasons, organise on the ground but I support and salute everyone going out into the kind of inclement weather we’ve been experiencing in Chicago to do so. These are the people who actually talk to voters at their doors, in their living rooms, and at community halls everywhere. The runoff election is on April 4, and if Johnson wins it will be because of the tireless work of Chicagoans who are among the meanest, most efficient organisers on the planet (I say that not so much with love as with wary, cautious respect).
I’m writing this in order to address a set of issues that have become compacted into what looks like a single and singular one: crime in Chicago. If you believed a bunch of armchair analysts (most of whom don’t even live here) or New York Times writers “reporting” on the election (all of whom seem to have researched their articles by hanging out at O’Hare and talking to disembarking passengers), 1 you’d be led to believe that it’s crime, crime, crime, crime that’s at the heart of this election.
Well, it is, and it isn’t. If you think of “crime” in simplistic ways—as in, bad and terrible things happen to people and everyone is fed up and the person elected will be the one who delivers the rosiest promises on how to end it—then, yes, this election is about crime.
But if you think about “crime” as a distillation of very long and complicated histories of race and other forms of identity, of policing, surveillance and even the very architecture of the city, then you have to dispense with the cheap talk of New Yorkers and even of local mainstream news media outlets, which skew conservative and suburban (the last time I watched the morning news regularly, I couldn’t help but note that nearly every newscaster commuted into the city, and that this was a source of pride for them).
This election is not about crime or even about race. It is about Chicagoans seeing a glimmer of hope that they might be able to take back a city that has been steadily decimated by the forces of privatisation and gutted by the greed of developers. But while Paul Vallas might seem like the logical and white expression of those disastrous trends, he is in fact only taking up the legacy of two Black history-making figures: Barack Obama and Lori Lightfoot. To understand why “race” and “crime” are so complicated in this city, we have to wade into some murky waters.
Vallas supporters, mostly white and conservative—just like him—whip up whirlpools of hysteria about crime by constantly referencing shootings, car hijackings, and other forms of violence. As Alden Loury points out, these white conservatives talk about crime as if they’re the ones most affected by it when, in fact, it’s people of colour who bear the brunt of violence, including and especially police brutality. In response to the Vallas campaign’s racially coded rhetoric, Johnson supporters have tended to assert that no matter what, Johnson must be elected—and they make their case in ways that imply that the latter’s race is key to how he handles the issues. In the process, they also end up with a cartoonish rendition of Vallas that turns him into Voldermort, deathly pale white skin gleaming in the moonlight as he concocts yet another scheme to demolish the fabric of the city and turn it into a playground for his very, very rich, white friends.
Make no mistake: that is in fact what he plans to do and what he has already done everywhere else he has ever laid his ghostly hands, just not in quite the same flamboyant costumes as Harry Potter’s nemesis. Consider that New Orleans no longer has a public school system, due to Vallas’s post-Katrina overhaul. Before that, he was among those responsible for the intense waves of privatisation that have had disastrous effects on Chicago’s public schools. And now, for this election, he has raised the threat of an imminent crime-induced collapse of a city he hates so much that he only “moved” here in time to qualify for the election. For Vallas, becoming Mayor of Chicago is just another way to enrich his multiple business contacts and, eventually, himself.
Valla’s sins as a privatiser and in upholding a murderous policing system are numerous, but none of it will make sense if, moving forward, we don’t consider the matter of race and crime in more complicated ways than, “Look at this white man enacting racist policies that harm people of colour.” Chicago’s most recent cycles of rampant gentrification and economic devastation have been and are being driven by two figures who have become national celebrities as symbols of change: Lori Lightfoot and Barack Obama, and both are Black.
Consider that Barack Obama is, in his own inimitable, oh-so-cool way, a Gentrifier and Privatiser in Chief whose work in aiding the hyper-development of the South Side has already furthered the decimation of the area. In 2018, when most people were too busy paying more attention to another Voldemort, Chicago handed over a sizable chunk of the publicly owned Jackson Park to the privately run Obama Foundation: $10 deal for 99 years. This is the site of a behemoth called the Obama Presidential Center (OPC): not an actual presidential library but a foundation expressly set up to accelerate gentrification and profits for Obama and his wealthy friends. Except for a few spots here and there, the South Side has historically been underserved: most of the neighbourhoods are in food deserts, for instance.
But it rests upon miles of beautiful lakeside land and is home to some gorgeous if overlooked historic architecture, all of which is prime for developers who have already begun swarming in and snapping up properties and lots in anticipation of future profits, as the South Side Weekly reports. Predictably, rents have skyrocketed. It is also no accident that the OPC is strategically located near the historic Garden of the Phoenix, dating back to 1893. This Japanese garden is tiny and exquisite and has, until recently, been open to the public at all times, a gentle and welcome respite from the city where herons will calmly and unhurriedly alight close to human visitors. Recently, park authorities decided, after over a hundred years of its existence, that it needed to be closed at night, claiming damage by nightime revellers. This is the beginning of the end: I believe that once the OPC is built, the garden will be closed to visitors and only used for private and exclusive fundraisers related to the Center. The OPC has promised to bring hundreds of jobs to the area, but there is no visible sign that these will be anything but low-paid, non-unionised, contractual work for janitors, waiters, and doorpersons. Such service sector jobs can be excellent but only if they come with union contracts and great pay, and that’s highly unlikely in such an economically depressed area.
To date, few in the mainstream media have dared to write about Obama’s presidential centre and expose it for what it is: a cross between a hedge fund and a ponzi scheme designed to attract developers to land that they will, well, develop but never bother to inhabit or even fill with residents.
What, you might wonder, is the connection between crime, Vallas, Johnson, privatisation, and Obama?
My point here is that “crime in Chicago” and the unnamed subtext, “race in Chicago,” don’t exist as the things that the Times and local mainstream news outlets want their readers to believe in. The difficulty for supporters of Johnson is that the only oppositional framework, the only response to such terms and coded discourse seems to be one that says, “Ah, no, no such thing” or, “Nah, it’s racist to say that we suffer from crime in Chicago.” To his very great credit, Johnson, as far as I can tell, isn’t saying any of that but my concern is that Chicagoans, mired as they are somewhere between White Guilt and White Racism, haven’t quite grasped how to bring about a complicated conversation about race, because few Chicagoans want to admit that race is a massively complicated matter in this city. My even greater concern is that the liberal and left tendency to pretend that racism is all about MAGA people versus The Rest of Us can only lead to disaster. But consider this: we could, conceivably, have seen a runoff between, oh, say, Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson. What would that have done to all our simplified and deeply simplistic ideas about how race and crime work in Chicago?
To understand that, we have to return to a time that many of us would rather forget, the Lori Lightfoot years, and consider how race is complicated by the history of gay politics in Chicago.
Lightfoot has the unique distinction of having been elected by a wide margin in all 50 wards, and to end up being despised in nearly all of them.
Lightfoot also has the unique distinction of having been far more beloved on the national news front than in her own city’s papers: if you listen to this 2021 New York Times podcast conversation between her and Kara Swisher, you can hear the sound of ass-kissing and laughter as the two women cosy up, just two lesbian gal pals bemoaning the racist heteropatriarchy, which they see as the biggest problem facing Lightfoot. Then and until her spectacular and much deserved fall, Lightfoot used her multifaceted identity to explain the prevalent hostility to her: “I’m Black, I’m female, I’m a lesbian. And no one expected me to win.”
In fact: Lightfoot was elected because she’s Black, female, and a lesbian.
It can’t be denied that being elected the first openly lesbian Black woman mayor of a major city in the United States was significant—and it also can’t be denied that Lightfoot coasted along on that trifecta of identity for a while. Her biggest and most influential—and wealthiest—supporters were the gay men and women who dominate this city’s politics.
What few outside of Chicago are unable to comprehend is that this city’s political sphere is significantly dominated by a cadre of influential LGBT people that, since the years of Richard M. Daley, has been able to control who gets elected, why, and where. Sure, yes, Daley’s father, a long-serving mayor of the city, was a notorious homophobe (and racist) but the son understood early on that gay men and women in Chicago were rising in cultural and economic influence (the latter, of course, is far more significant to any politician) and they were among his biggest supporters for the three decades of his reign. By the time he stepped down, “Gay Power” in Chicago meant not sexual liberation but actual, political power vested in a segment of mainstream gay men and women (we queer radicals have been fighting gentrification and police brutality for decades). Lightfoot was faltering in the polls until she shored up her influence among the gay population: in an interview with the gay paper Windy City Times, Yoni Pizer, briefly a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, was asked what direct effect his activism as a gay Democratic fundraiser might have had and he laughed, “Mayor Lightfoot?” Pizer is not the biggest player on the scene (he has since returned to work as gay Community Liaison for Congressman Mike Quigley, back into a position of power), but you know who else is gay, out, powerful, and based in Chicago? Fred Eychaner, the elusive but deeply powerful media mogul. To a national press and publications like the New York Times, power is measured by flamboyant visibility (the Times once swooned over Trump and his buildings, until it didn’t). Power works differently in Chicago: it’s not so much that it’s gay (and it is: very, very gay) but that it works in quietly imperious ways.
This brings us back to the matter of race and ethnicity in Chicago, which cannot be disentangled from Gay Power. From the outside, Chicago looks vaguely like it’s almost evenly divided among Black and white residents, with various other ethnic communities in the mix. And, as we’re often reminded: we had an Out Black Lesbian as a mayor. So how bad can it be?
The truth about Chicago is that it operates like a plantation. Everything about this city is designed to reinforce racial and racist lines, to make sure that Black and brown people can’t cross over into majority white neighbourhoods (Chicago is heavily segregated: the north is mostly white, the south is mostly Black, and the west is a mix of races and ethnicities). When they do, the consequences can be dire. On July 27, 1929, a Black teenager named Eugene Williams went swimming in Lake Michigan with his friends. At some point, they crossed an invisible colour barrier into the waters of a whites only beach: Williams was literally stoned to death and the incident set off seven days of riots.
This may seem like ancient history—surely, we might think, such a thing could never happen today, in this seemingly multi-racial, multi-ethnic city. In fact, the logic of the plantation—which is what structured the Williams murder—still prevails in Chicago, and the city’s white residents are constantly activated by the same kind of racial hatred that marked those days in 1929. In 2012, the original Gawker featured these snippets from Chicagoans, detailing why this is probably the most racist city in the country. “Ken” relates an incident where he and another Black teen were literally chased out of a park near the Catholic school they attended. Later in life, as a young Black reporter sent on assignment to Bridgeport ( the infamously racist neighbourhood that’s home to the Daley family and, now, Paul Vallas) he saw a park bench where “someone had scrawled in marker: ‘Bridgeport Nigger Beaters’, followed by a phone number.”
Like Power, racism in Chicago is also very, very gay. In 2011, white gay residents of what was then called Boystown (now renamed Northalsted) insisted that Black youth were responsible for a series of violent muggings in “their” historically gay neighbourhood. The charges stemmed from the fact that LGBTQ Black and other other youth of colour were coming to the coyly named Center on Halsted (the city’s unofficial gay community centre), an organisation supposedly designed to provide social services to the city’s queer population. The youth had and still have no choice but to make their way north because they have few such resources on the south and west sides. As researchers like Zachary Blair have documented, the gay men of the neighbourhood (and more than a few lesbians) went so far as to organise evening and night-time patrols with their dogs, hunting for youth of colour who were, in their minds, not supposed to be there.
This kind of racism is not uncommon in the city’s gay community. When I lived near the newer gay neighbourhood of Andersonville on the north side, a white gay man would persistently and only half-jokingly—and very loudly and pointedly—tell his dog to attack me. At the time, in the early aughts, I wrote a lot that was critical of gay marriage and Obama and got used to liberal gay men hissing at me in public and even in private gatherings but this was, shall we say, over the top. That the dog in question was a sweet and slightly goofy Golden Retriever and not a German Shepherd did nothing to reassure me. That the man felt perfectly comfortable commanding his dog to attack a woman of colour in the bright light of day, in the middle of a white, gay neighbourhood speaks volumes about the extent to which white Chicagoans so easily resort to the language and the actions of times they may not have lived in but which they have absorbed into their DNA. Much more recently, in November 2022, the north side leather bar Touché celebrated its 45th anniversary with a performance by puppeteer Jerry Halliday. As reported in Block Club, “the white performer came out with a Black puppet named Sista Girl and started speaking with a ‘Blaccent’” and, according to those present, “made jokes about loving watermelon and being on welfare, while video of his performance showed Halliday asking manager David Boyer to collect tips for the Black puppet’s five children.” My friend Cris Bleaux resigned from the bar in protest. When I wrote on his Facebook wall about the prevalence of plantation racism among Chicago’s gay men, one man (who clearly read me as a Black gay man because, apparently, my cat Frida gives off the gayest vibes) responded:
Doug Bennett may not be a public gay figure in the city, but his reducing Black gay men to their penises harks back to slavery and is fairly typical of the city’s mainstream white gay population: to this day, most gay bars will ask people of colour for multiple forms of identity and Northalsted remains the site of intense racism (and, yes, I still won’t go there if I can help it). Like the white gay man who set his dog on me, Bennett was unafraid to call out someone he read as a Black man (note the persistent use of “you” and that he had nothing to say about the racist performance) in starkly sexual terms, on a public wall. It’s not just that Chicagoans are deeply racist, but that they are unflinching in their open expression of racist beliefs. The spectre of the plantation—where dogs were historically used to hunt down errant or escaping slaves and Black men were raised or killed for their breeding capabilities—still haunts Chicago.
It’s not just mostly white north side neighbourhoods that have a problem with racism.
If Chicago is run like a plantation, Hyde Park operates like a Big House.
One of the biggest surprises, for me, about moving to Hyde Park from the mostly white north side was to discover how ferociously many Black Hyde Parkers will patrol and surveil their establishments against other people of colour. Margo Jefferson and others have written about Hyde Park’s very peculiar history and racial politics: it is both the most historically desegregated neighbourhood in the city and among the most racist. Suffice it to say that everything you may have heard and read about the neighbourhood’s strangeness around race and class is true, and there’s more (a forthcoming essay will explore this in greater detail: it is all much too strange and complex to go into here). But it’s not as if Hyde Parkers are immune from violence; the neighbourhood continues to see several incidents on a regular basis.
Consider the photograph I chose to illustrate this article. That’s a bullet in a wall below a window of the apartment where I lived a few years ago. One night, a man shot thirty bullets into a crowd leaving the Falcon Inn, just doors down from where I lived, killing one man and injuring others. Somehow, I had the sense to not stand at the window while it happened and the good luck that no bullet found its way towards me. On two other occasions, I narrowly missed being shot by gunmen who went on shooting rampages in the neighbourhood.
We can’t combat Vallas’s hideously racist and fear-mongering talk about crime in Chicago without first acknowledging that crime exists and that too many of us feel its effects on us, whether or not we see the bullet holes. To ask people to vote for Johnson cannot be about telling them to vote for an anti-racist, Black mayor of Chicago or about shaming them for being “self-hating” if they don’t do so and are also people of colour (arguments I’ve heard in real life and online). I find these kinds of campaigns frighteningly useless: no person of colour is obliged to vote for someone just because they share or are adjacent to the candidate’s ethnic or racial heritage. Race is one part of people’s lives, but it does not overdetermine everything. If a white, privatising, cop-loving candidate offers even the false hope of ascension to the middle class, a Black or brown person is within their rights to vote for that person. If that same candidate offers more police to combat the very real fears of people who worry about guns going off outside their windows, Black and brown people have a right to vote for him.
The South Side is so underserved that the city didn’t bother to fully clean up the blood from the shooting victim at the Falcon. Globby bits just lay on the asphalt, slowly drying, for weeks; I passed them every day. And that’s really, kinda, the story of Chicago right now: the bloodstains remain, and the bullet holes are never patched up. People are being forced out of the neighbourhoods they’ve lived in for years. The white morning news anchor commutes to the city to work from the suburbs, the Latino Lyft driver commutes from the city to Indiana to live: one by choice, the other by necessity.
Unlike previous challengers to the status quo, Brandon Johnson offers the strongest choice we’ve had in decades. But the Black-white axis—which is also the crime/less crime/more policing axis— won’t be of any help, and it shouldn’t be deployed except to explicitly call out Vallas and his cohorts when they speak in coded language about “leadership” and “crime” and “empowerment.” Chicago gave the world its eight-hour day and the weekend, and you’re all very welcome. It also gave this country its first Black lesbian mayor and laid the ground for the ascension of its first Black president, and I apologise on the city’s behalf. Both have been disastrous for the country and the city, with pro-privatisation policies that will continue to haunt Chicago for decades. Now, we have a chance to move towards a different set of possibilities, but we can only do that if we think about race and crime in Chicago as far more complicated than anything either our pundits or the New York Times would have us believe.
As for the mainstream gay community: if you want their votes and their money, remind them that a man who is against abortion because of his personal faith (Greek Orthodox) is also likely to be against homosexuality for the same reason. But don’t be surprised at their resistance to Johnson: Gay Power as it exists in Chicago also wants more of the economic gains of rampant privatisation and the kind of “security” that polices and brutalises poorer people of colour, and wealthy gay men and women send their children to private and charter schools.
If elected, Paul Vallas will follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama and Lori Lightfoot in furthering the decline of this city by selling it to developers, bit by bit, until only its fabled skyline exists alongside massively privatised lakefront views. After years of tepid alternatives in mayoral races, we finally have a choice to make, and that choice is Brandon Johnson.
With many thanks to Liz Baudler, who patiently and generously read drafts of this at several last minutes, and Tyler Ingraham, who helped me understand some thorny matters related to bullets. Any remaining mistakes and issues are my own.
For more, see “Of Towers and Toilets: A Tale of Two Developments.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
- I derive this joke from a now long-lost tweet that, I believe, originated with @xianb8