2020-7-6 A Day for Somber Reckoning

A Day for Somber Reckoning

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

–Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream” (28 August 1963)

Saturday was America’s national liberation holiday – on July 4, 1776, its foundational and, we add, still largely aspirational document, the Declaration of Independence, was signed in Philadelphia in a building later renamed “Independence Hall.” The Declaration was signed by representatives from 13 colonies along the Eastern seaboard by our “Founding Fathers.” There were of course no “Founding Mothers”; women wouldn’t be awarded the right to vote until 1920 (19^th Amendment), nearly 150 years later. And former slaves (freed in 1865) were granted the vote only through the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution (1870), the third of the so-called “Reconstruction Amendments.”

Here is the Declaration’s second sentence, once learnt by heart by every school child:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

All Americans have the “unalienable” right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in theory, but here at Deedspeakout, our interest lies in whether they have that right in practice.

When: where you’re born, and to whom you’re born, substantively affect where you’ll go to school, how much education you’ll ultimately receive, and how much debt you’ll assume while gaining that education; whether you’ll grow up in an environment relatively free of industrial and agricultural pollutants which degrade the air, soil, and water you breathe, walk on, and drink, respectively; what kind of job you’ll eventually work at, and how much you’ll earn throughout your life; whether you’ll earn enough to purchase a home of your own; what type of health care you’ll receive, and whether earlier determinants (see above, “air, soil, water”) will mean that you suffer from one or more chronic illnesses which materially impact your quality of life, and finally, whether your last years will be lived in dignity and freedom from material want or in poverty and perpetual need – when all of these obtain, then any thinking person cannot but question whether all Americans are born into the reality of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” or the unfulfilled dream of same.

Chicago, the home to some 2.7 million people, its population nearly evenly apportioned among whites (32.6%), Hispanics (29.7%), and Blacks (29.3%) (2016 figures), has had a very cruel three weeks in the wake of the demonstrations which rocked the nation following George Floyd’s murder on May 25 in Minneapolis.

Chicago’s murder stats for the last three weekends: (a) Father’s Day weekend (June 19-22): 104 shootings, 15 deaths, including a 3-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl (b) last weekend in June (June 26-29): 65 shootings, 18 deaths, including a 1-year-old boy, a 10-year-old girl, and a 17-year-old boy; (c) July 4^th weekend (July 3-6): 67 shootings, 13 deaths (to date), including a 7-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy.

The shootings, some perpetrated by drive-by shooters apparently aiming without any particular target into crowds of people going about their lives (others, of course, had intended targets but their shots went awry), took place in West Side and South Side neighborhoods – Englewood, West Englewood, Lawndale, Austin to name four of the most-frequently cited. Compared to last year at this time, the city has seen a 33% increase in shootings and a 22% rise in murders.

Despite the fact that Chicago is the most heavily-policed large city in America (43.9 police per 10,000 residents), it has the highest number of homicides (24.13 per 100,000 residents) (2016 figures). And to listen to the MSM commentary – or read about the violence in the national press – the reasons why remain an impenetrable mystery. In fact, they’re so mysterious that they scarcely merit a mention in the frenzied feed of sound-bite statistics citations. (Note: Today’s NYT piece does mention unemployment, poverty, and Covid-19, though no further analysis beyond a mention is provided.)

Scholars of Chicago’s history of race relations, including those between the Chicago Police Department and its Black population (which is now concentrated in neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides), understand that policing in Chicago has never been about providing its residents – all its residents – safety and security, despite the fine words of many a mayor and alderman. It’s been about protecting high-value private property and property-owners (that’s why Mayor Lori Lightfoot cut off access to the Loop during the first couple weeks of June) and punishing the city’s Black population through policies that target mostly lower-level and sometimes imaginary offenses.

[“The second big takeaway is that when we think about the problems of policing and why policing doesn’t work, at least doesn’t work the way people like to think it does, when we look at how Black communities like Chicago’s experience policing, it’s a two-sided story. So on the one hand, it’s a story of being overpoliced, of being subject to constant harassment, constant surveillance, constant violence, including torture. All of that happens while, at the same time, Black communities do not actually experience much in the way of supposed public safety. So when we think about communities that are the most subject to intercommunal violence, the communities that are the least safe, they’re also the communities that are also the most overpoliced. And so it raises the question of: What’s the point?” – Simon Balto, Interview cited below in “Further Reading”]

Lightfoot put 1,200 additional officers on the streets over the 4th of July weekend, but when it comes to homicide, Chicago policing – like most – is reactionary rather than preemptive. There’s not a lot the CPD has shown itself able (willing?) to do to prevent shootings – and after the fact, they haven’t proven themselves very effective at solving them, either (CPD clearance rate of 36% in 2017, which compares poorly with those of other major metropolitan forces – for that same year, NYC’s rate was 85%, and LA’s 73%).

[Note: on the clearance rate, we’ve also seen a figure as low as 20% – apparently some statistical sleight-of-hand is involved in the Department’s own calculations.]

So what’s going on? This is not a new problem for the city, but it’s been particularly bad over the last month or so. Consider:

1. The psychological effects of the shutdown between mid-March and June (Chicago entered Phase 3, which opened a fair number of economic sectors, on June 3, about a week later than the rest of the state)
2. The number of West and South Side Chicagoans who lost their jobs between March and June, or who were working in jobs that exposed them to the coronavirus (health care professionals, janitorial and maintenance staff, professional drivers, security guards)
3. The mortality rate for Blacks in Chicago is around three times that of whites and Blacks are three times more likely to contract the virus
4. The pre-pandemic poverty rates in these neighborhoods (Englewood/West Englewood = 34.2% v. 13.1% U.S. average in 2017)
5. The locations of the 50 public schools Rahm Emanuel peremptorily shut down in 2013 (schools which had been in operation for decades, sometimes generations, and which had long served as community anchors)
6. Recent calls to defund the CPD, in particular to remove them from Chicago Public Schools, with proposals to shift $33 million budgeted for SROs (School Resource Officers) in some 72 schools to funding for additional counselors, nurses, and restorative justice programs (something the Chicago Teachers Union [CTU] and other public school advocacy groups have been urging for some time)

CPD officers don’t go on strike, but the neighborhoods hardest-hit by gun violence the past three weeks are starting to wonder whether the force is engaged in a silent slowdown (“blue flu”) to retaliate for calls to defund and/or reform policing nationwide. There is little danger of this happening in Chicago, however, as Mayor Lightfoot has repeatedly supported CPD and rejected all calls to date to remove CPD from Chicago schools.

To the six factors listed above, one must add what may make Chicago unique: the past and more recent history of CPD practices (its black ops torture of prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s under Jon Burge, which led to the first-ever awarding of reparations [$5.5 million] to victims of police violence in the U.S.; the October 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, Chicago’s own George Floyd-before-John Floyd, which led to a cover-up by Mayor Emanuel and the CPD Superintendent and was probably the major factor contributing to Emanuel’s decision not to run for a third term).

[Note: Since the creation of CPD’s current iteration by Mayor Richard Daley the Elder in 1960, the Department’s wiki page lists no fewer than 17 major scandals.]

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, activists have called for the defunding of the police (who, we must remember, represent only one facet of the justice system – the bail system, the trial system, the sentencing system, imprisonment, and the parole system must also be considered when re-envisioning the entirety of how justice is meted out), and white people have, for the umpteenth time, discovered that they are racist. Statues of men symbolizing white supremacism are being toppled; “Black Lives Matter” has been painted on 5^th Avenue right outside Trump Tower, one of the Avenue’s most iconic buildings; Princeton’s famed Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs will be renamed; Christopher Columbus’s statue in Baltimore was torn down and tossed into the city’s Inner Harbor on Saturday.

[Note: In the “Useful Idiots” podcast cited under “Further Reading” below, Adolph Reed refers to all of this activity as “dramaturgy.”]

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these actions, of course, but we shouldn’t allow them to distract us from the fact that if the median family income in Englewood/West Englewood were $100,000 instead of $27,000, the gun violence which has resulted in a total of 236 shootings and 46 deaths over the course of three weeks would never have happened.

Chicago has recently acquired yet another Superintendent of Police, David Brown (the 14^th man to hold the position since the office’s creation in 1960, which breaks down to an average tenure of just over four years). The former Dallas Police Chief, Brown, a Dallas native, has been on the job all of 10 weeks. Admittedly he’s undergoing a baptism by fire since he doesn’t know the Department, the city and its neighborhoods, or its politics. But on June 22, his attribution of the shootings to “gangs, drugs, and thugs” and “not enough time spent in jail” wasn’t exactly an auspicious start to his tenure.

Here’s something for Brown – and all of us – to think about: instead of “gangs, drugs, and thugs” as the causes of violence in Chicago’s West and South Side neighborhoods, maybe we should consider these as proximate causes.

The ultimate causes, we suggest, are more like “disinvestment, despair, and desperation.”

And until Chicagoans, Illinoisans, and Americans face up to that somber reality, everything else is performative, and the right of all to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” will remain illusory.  

Further reading/listening:

Chicago Tribune, “Tracking Chicago Homicide Victims”

Ja’Mal Green, “Black economics is the ROOT of violence,” with investor John Rogers Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr, “I  Have a Dream” (full text)

Linda Lutton, Becky Vevea et al, “A Generation of School Closings”

Neil MacFarquhar and Robert Chiarito “Chicago gun violence spikes and increasingly finds the youngest victims”

Matt Taibbi, “On White Fragility”  

Douglas E. Thompson, “Economic equality: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s other dream”

“Useful Idiots” July 3, 2020, with guest Professor Adolph Reed

+ “Occupied Territory: Why Chicago’s History Matters for Today’s Demands to Defund Police” (Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Simon Balto, author of the recently-published Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power [2020]) Highly recommended