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Ironically on April Fool’s Day last month, Paul Vallas wrote a piece for Illinois Policy, an education, pension, and budget focused nonprofit think tank. The piece is entitled “Brandon Johnson’s War Against Chicago’s Black Community.” In it, he boldly sets forth the proposition on which my essay rests:
“Brandon Johnson claims racism is behind his inability to lead and help the Black community. But his policies on crime, taxes, migrants, education, and jobs are the real villains.”
Let’s begin our critical analysis of Vallas’s paper by taking a closer look at what he’s claiming. He says that racism has nothing to do with Johnson’s “inability to lead and help the Black community.” To claim that the last four decades of Black and brown people living under the social savagery caused by budget cuts, school closings, unemployment, poverty, police crimes, and mass incarceration has nothing to do with racism is a brazen lie.
According to Vallas, the policies Mayor Brandon Johnson has put forth — like the Bring Chicago Home referendum to raise taxes on the wealthy; jobs for Black youth; respecting the rights of immigrants; and defending public education — are just plain wrong and have nothing to do with racism.
Vallas maintains that Johnson is using racism to explain away every problem and failure to address real policy issues “plaguing both Chicago and the Black community.” We’re supposed to believe that instead of racism being a problem, the problem is Johnson using it to explain away a problem? That’s nonsense.
It’s typical of Paul Vallas and every other racist to deny that past patterns and practices of racism and economic oppression are the root causes of every problem facing the Black community today.
Is Paul Vallas really saying that crime and violence, police crimes and mass incarceration, unemployment, homelessness, lack of healthcare, and the privatization of public education are not the problems that need to be addressed in Black and brown communities? Yes, he is. His focus is on the fact that Johnson’s “budgets have eliminated 833 additional police vacancies, ensuring the city will continue to be 2,000 officers below full staff,” Vallas writes.
For him, the solution to crime is more police, more arrests, and more mass incarceration. These are precisely the policies that have been failing for the last century.
We’re not surprised that when Paul Vallas addresses policy, all he’s talking about is violent crimes, homicides, and mass shootings. Unlike Johnson, he does not talk about addressing the crime problem with jobs and eliminating poverty. Instead, he offers racist and political repression as solutions.
Vallas criticizes Johnson for having cancelled the ShotSpotter program, claiming the gunshot detection technology saves lives. It didn’t save the life of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old child killed by the Chicago police while responding to a ShotSpotter alert in the area.
Vallas and all the reactionary politicians and Trumpites in Chicago use the violence that takes place in Black and brown communities as a justification for more police and more uses of police technology to address crime because they see no connection between crime, unemployment, and poverty.
