Racist Mayor: Lori Lightfoot

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series Frontpage is running on Racist Mayors. See subsequent parts below this article.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of May 24, a 17-year-old black youth named Keyshawn Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Oakley Boulevard when someone in a silver BMW opened fire and killed him in a drive-by shooting.

The night before that, a 25-year-old African American named Ladell Arnold was riding in a vehicle along West Flournoy Street in Chicago at 7:10 p.m. when he was shot and killed by a nearby gunman.

The night before that, a 46-year-old black man named Johnnie Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue at 7:30 p.m. when some people riding in two passing vehicles shot him dead while also wounding two others.

And at 11:50 p.m. the night before that, a 15-year-old black boy named Dajon Gater was on the front porch of a West Lexington Street house in Chicago, when two armed males approached and killed him with a gunshot to the head.

Like four tiny grains of sand among many thousands in an hourglass, the names of these four dead victims blend imperceptibly into the long list of African Americans whose lives in recent years have been snuffed out by other blacks in the killing field known as Chicago. During the past 12 months alone, more than 820 people have been victims of homicide in The Windy City. And most of them were blacks killed by other blacks.  

Of course, you’ve never before heard of any of the four individuals cited above – nor will you ever come across their names again – for the simple reason that none of their deaths can be traced to the actions of a white police officer – or to the actions of any white person at all, for that matter. Thus, there will be no Black Lives Matter protest marches held in their honor; no $25,000 celebrity-funded golden caskets eternally encasing their bodies in the grave; and no gaggle of reporters or “civil rights leaders” repeatedly recounting, with pained and pious countenances, the tragic stories of how these four individuals died, far too young, in America’s third largest city. No, the only words publicly memorializing these four people will be the names etched silently on their tombstones.

The chief political executive of the hell hole called Chicago is Lori Lightfoot, the latest in an unbroken, 90-year line of exclusively Democrat mayors extending all the way back to 1931. Under Lightfoot’s stewardship, homicides in Chicago increased by an astonishing 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 – a pattern that was seen in a host of Democrat-run cities after George Floyd’s death a year ago. And Chicago’s stratospheric homicide rate has continued well into 2021.

In light of the fact that violent death has become a way of life in Lightfoot’s Chicago, it was nothing short of remarkable to hear her recently announce that “on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city,” she would be “prioritizing media requests from POC reporters,” an acronym meaning “people of color” — rather than prioritizing the urgent need to get the city’s murder rate under control. Chicago political reporter Mary Ann Ahern confirmed that according to the mayor’s spokeswoman, “Lightfoot is granting 1 on 1 interviews only to Black or Brown journalists.”

Lightfoot was more than eager to defend her clearly articulated intent to separate reporters into two separate classes, the preferred (nonwhite) and the non-preferred (white). Like the Black Lives Matter racists who felt wholly justified in terrorizing hundreds of American cities and towns last year, Lightfoot is more than proud to display her own particular brand of racism like a badge of honor. In a two-page letter to the media, she wrote that her decision to deny interview requests from white reporters was based on her commitment to “fight for diversity and inclusion,” “break up the status quo” that has been “failing so many,” and pay homage to the “historic reckoning” by which the nation has recently been forced to confront its own “systemic racism” and its “deep-seated legacies around institutionalized racism.” Lamenting “the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets,” Lightfoot wrote: “It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI [Asian American / Pacific Islander] or Native American.”

“At the two-year anniversary of my inauguration,” Lightfoot told the press, “I am issuing a challenge to you. Hire reporters of color – especially women of color – to cover Chicago politics, and City Hall in particular. If you have only a white reporter covering City Hall, make sure there’s a person of color working with them as well.” In short, Mayor Lightfoot feels justified in dictating to private media companies exactly how they should allocate their limited financial resources, and whom they should hire to do which jobs. As is invariably the case with self-identified leftwing warriors for “racial justice,” the spirit of totalitarianism burns bright and hot in the heart of Lori Lightfoot.

Nor is racial obsession anything new for Mayor Lightfoot. She’s very comfortable with it. Indeed, just three months ago Lightfoot proudly announced that “a racial healing and historical reckoning” initiative known as the  Chicago Monuments Project, which the city had launched six months earlier to confront the “hard truths of Chicago’s racial history,” had determined that no fewer than 41 separate statues and monuments situated in various locations across the city could be subject to removal from the public square because they: (a) “promot[e] narratives of white supremacy”; (b) “memorializ[e] individuals with connections to racist acts, slavery and genocide”; (c) presen[t] selective, over-simplified, one-sided views of history”; and (d) do “not sufficiently include[e] other stories, in particular those of women, people of color and themes of labor, migration and community building.” The purportedly offensive statues and monuments include those erected in honor of such notables as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, William McKinley, Leif Ericson, the French missionary Jacques Marquette, and the cartographer Louis Jolliet.

“This project is a powerful opportunity for us to come together as a city to assess the many monuments and memorials across our neighborhoods and communities—to face our history and what and how we memorialize that history,” Lightfoot said. This was particularly important, the mayor emphasized, in light of “the past year and in particular the past summer that made clear [that America’s racist] history isn’t past.”

The standards by which Mayor Lightfoot is prepared to pass judgment on the alleged moral deficiencies of historical giants and national heroes, stand in stark contrast to the standards by which she judges modern-day leftists.

Consider, for instance, how Lightfoot, in the early days of her mayoralty two years ago, gleefully celebrated the passage of Illinois’ so-called Reproductive Health Act (RHA), which repealed the state’s Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act; removed restrictions on late-term abortions and on the imposition of criminal penalties against physicians who perform them; and expanded insurance coverage for abortion procedures. When the RHA initially cleared the state’s Human Services Committee and was sent to the full Illinois House for consideration, Lightfoot issued a statement saying, “I applaud the legislators who voted yes tonight on the passage of the Reproductive Health Act…. The time is now to ensure that we preserve access to safe, legal abortion in our state. We won’t go backwards.” When the bill was subsequently signed into law by the governor a few weeks later, Lightfoot said: “Today, the state of Illinois sent a clear message that we will protect the fundamental right of residents and expand access to reproductive health care.”

So, Lori Lightfoot’s standard is abundantly clear. Statues honoring white people who made enormous contributions to America and to Western civilization — but who may have been insufficiently militant, by Lightfoot’s reckoning, in fighting to eradicate slavery — should be banned from the public square as punishment for the shortcomings of those individuals. But modern-day leftwing zealots who stand in favor of legalizing the killing of fully formed human beings in the womb – in the noble name of “reproductive rights,” of course – are to be hailed and celebrated as champions of liberty.

Subsequent Parts of Series:
Part 2: LA’s Eric Garcetti.
Part 3: DC’s Muriel Bowser.
Part 4: KC’s Quinton Lucas.
Part 5: SF’s London Breed.
Part 6: Philly’s Jim Kenney.
Part 7: St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones.
Part 8: Jackson’s Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Part 9: Seattle’s Jenny Durkan.
Part 10: Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey.
Part 11: Charlottesville’s Nikuyah Walker.
Part 12: Portland’s Ted Wheeler.
Part 13: Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Part 14: NYC’s Bill de Blasio.