Both Chicago Mayoral Candidates Made Clear They Support Systems of Oppression...
...what Chicagoans do after either takes the city's reigns will decide our future
Both Paul Vallas (L) and Brandon Johnson (R) pledged their support to racist systems and institutions during their race for Chicago’s office of Mayor
This is important, but it doesn’t need to take long. It’s disappointing, but it needs to be done.
Brandon Johnson is either a coward or he’s not in any real alignment with this writer or anyone who I share societal goals or values with. As I write this the polls are still open for a few minutes, and I don’t know if he’ll be our next Mayor here in Chicago or not.
I’m quite certain that it doesn’t matter. I didn’t feel that way up until very recently.
Up until just about a week ago I felt enthusiasm rare for a Chicago election. I liked the prospect of a former teacher and active labor union member like Johnson becoming Mayor of this, our severely (though rarely recognized as such) reactionary city. In a time when elections rarely seem to have anything to do with substantive choice and freedom, Johnson was blessed in my mind by having an ultra right-wing, MAGA opponent and destroyer of cities in Paul Vallas.
Elections aren’t always consequential, but an opportunity to reject both Lori Lightfoot and Vallas in one election cycle seemed like at least...something constructive. After all, as I’ve written before, sometimes simply saying “No” is a start, and a crucial one.
I thought Johnson’s campaign represented something markedly different than that of the current Mayor and of his run-off opponent. Johnson seemed like a good idea until he pledged his support to the murderous Chicago Police Department and to the American proxy-apartheid system in the state of Israel which illegally occupies Palestine.
Brandon Johnson used to speak at Defund the Police rallies. Good.
The Chicago Police Department’s budget keeps getting increased at the same time as its notorious terrorizing of the city’s residents contributes to legal settlement payments to its victims in the amount of nearly $100 million a year. Now, Johnson says he never called for the police department to be defunded.
We saw you do it, Brandon, and we were proud of it. It’s why so many of us supported you. Johnson had proposed modest cuts to our dangerous police department, but once Vallas’ band of thin blue line racists pushed back in the expected manner, he backed down and promised that he wouldn’t cut even “one penny” from this department which operates a literal torture black site and which a recent study condemned for having “no regard” for minority residents.
As devastating as that shirking was from Johnson, he may have topped it just a couple days later when he nervously overcompensated for not earlier being able to define antisemitism (an inexcusable gap in his thinking and preparedness, in and of itself) by then endorsing what top international and Israeli human rights organizations unanimously call an apartheid state - the state of Israel’s racialized system subjugation of indigenous Palestinians.
Pressed once again to define antisemitism after his earlier inability to articulate a coherent characterization of one of modern society’s most prominent scourges, Johnson then said that antisemitism is when someone agrees with the United Nations, International Law, and human rights organizations, all of whom have and do consider the violent White European colonial settler project of occupying Palestine as illegal and as a racist apartheid state. “Any speech or any effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist, that’s how I view antisemitism,” he said.
I take no pleasure in having reached the crestfallen but sober conclusion that Johnson is either a coward or not at all in alignment with my values or goals for society. I want Chicago Police to stop murdering and torturing my neighbors and for resources to be taken from Police and be diverted instead to efforts social scientists tell us actually reduce crime at the source. Brandon Johnson wants to keep over-funding Police, giving them all they need to continue their reign of terror.
I want my exiled Palestinian brothers and sisters to have a right of return to the homeland that they were driven from at the point of a gun, and I want those still living in Palestine to be freed from the apartheid system that Israel and the United States have forced them to live under. So long as we call that illegal settler colonial state “legitimate,” that won’t happen, because the tag of legitimacy hides the crime and then precludes amelioration.
I’m not the only disappointed one in Chicago but it would appear that far too few are willing to demand more from Johnson. Brandon is better, I’m told, he doesn’t really need to be in full alignment.
To be clear, he can be whatever he wants to. He’s a grown, well-paid politician man.
Beyond that, I’m a staunch believer that it doesn’t matter a great deal who sits on the throne, but instead that they fear the people they rule over. That is to say the people need to bend our rulers to our own collective will, regardless of who the ruler is.
What we’re discussing here is what I can and cannot abide in myself. Paul Vallas is reprehensible because he’s a bigot and fascist who has made as a centerpiece to his identity giving the people’s money to the repressive forces who oppress them.
Let me sacrifice comprehensive description for clarity - I can't support Vallas because he supports racist and classist systems.
If Johnson supports those same racist and classist systems there is no meaningful difference between them to me and so I also can’t support him for the exact reason I can’t support Vallas. It matters not at all that Johnson if uses more timid, less enthusiastic rhetoric to provide the same material support for said institutions.
Both Johnson and Vallas have pledged their support to funding the Chicago Police department at its ballooned levels. Both Johnson and Vallas support the state of Israel and its apartheid subjugation of indigenous Palestinians whose land it illegally occupies.
Brandon is better...not for my friends getting beaten by Police. Brandon is better....not for my Palestinian homies.
Some issues are so central to the world either moving towards or away from liberation that wrong stances on them are disqualifying. American policing is uniquely lethal and racist.
Anyone who wants to keep feeding that stuffed pig’s coffers is not someone I can support. Apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine have devastated and exterminated millions upon millions of indigenous people so anyone endorsing that is not someone I can support.
Even before taking his fifth-floor office in City Hall Brandon Johnson has already caved to the Chicago Police Department. With regards to Israeli apartheid, that his tacit support for it is a largely symbolic stance is also instructive.
As the Mayor of Chicago it’s more than likely that nothing beyond supporting or condemning the apartheid state of Israel in word would ever be demanded of him. Chicago Mayor’s don’t (usually) decide federal policies, after all.
Still, even though he’d never likely be called upon to do anything concrete for Palestinians suffering under Israeli apartheid rule and exile, Brandon Johnson still couldn’t muster enough courage and/or righteousness to merely speak out against their oppressors.
We’ve already had plenty of politicians in recent history from whom we demanded far too little during their campaigns, only to see them continue to manage and uphold the systems of oppression we put them in office to fight. How many Nobel peace prize winners need to turn into war-criminals, or police accountability investigators turn police murder cover-up artists, or critics of MAGA xenophobia turn into ethnic concentration camp managers-in-Chief of their own do we need to elect before learning the lesson?
Left to their own devices, politicians will never over-deliver beyond what we made them promise during their campaigns. When it works well electoralism’s potential is fulfilled when we demand the world from politicians when they are candidates for office and then use the specter of losing office, donations, and use direct action to force them to deliver on whatever campaign promises that we can compel them to, afterwards.
Chicago has already done as it will at the polls today. Sadly, for those who care about systems of racist oppression, whoever gets elected Mayor will too closely resemble their rival.
Plain truth needn’t produce despair, however. This is just a reminder that whoever takes over the city will need to be reminded that we can take it back from them if they don’t change their tune to better suit our needs.