Brandon Johnson makes racism his closing pitch in Chicago’s mayoral race
Zachary Faria
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Chicago will choose its next mayor on Tuesday, and the two candidates are making their closing pitches. Paul Vallas has been focused on crime. Brandon Johnson is making an appeal to racism.
Johnson’s final pitch is that the mayoral race is “about black labor versus white wealth.”
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Vallas has consistently held a narrow lead in the polls, as crime has been the top issue Chicago voters have been considering. Meanwhile, Johnson supported defunding the police in the past and has spent much of the campaign trying to hide that fact. With little of a case to make on public safety, he has instead moved toward the kind of racism that progressives love in order to sell his campaign.
Race-baiting has become Johnson’s go-to campaign tool. Last week, he all but outright stated that Vallas was racist, accusing him of “being dismissive of a black man who taught for four years in Chicago Public Schools.” His concern with the COVID-19 pandemic was “to make sure that black and brown people in particular did not continue to die.”
All criticism of his campaign is just “yet another attack on a black man as an elected leader.”
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The biggest issue facing Chicago is not racism, though, unless you consider elected leaders ignoring a crime crisis that disproportionately affects black residents to be racist. Mayor Lori Lightfoot took the same focus on peddling racism while ignoring the homicide crisis that was becoming worse under her leadership. She was easily defeated in the primary election, only for Chicago residents to consider a candidate who offers more of the same.
Whether or not Vallas will be the mayor to fix Chicago is unclear. After all, he is yet another Democrat in a city that has turned to Democrats to fix its problems for 92 years with no real progress. But Johnson is very clearly not up to the job. He is obsessed with race and soft on crime, which has proven to be a deadly combination in major cities across the country for the last several years.