Lightfoot utters 2 words we can’t run from
Lori Lightfoot dared to utter the “R” words. We run away from one: Racism.
We need the other to heal. Reconciliation.
Lori Lightfoot went there last week in testimony before the Chicago City Council. She came to elaborate on the 190- page report issued by the Police Accountability Task Force. Led by Lightfoot and issued in April, it was a damning look at policing in Chicago.
Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and president of the Chicago Police Board, spoke Wednesday to the Council’s Police Accountability Subcommittee as it prepares to debate reform legislation.
She wanted to clarify the task force’s findings on policing and race, she said, which “still has not been accurately reported.”
“What we said was that we heard from a number of people across the city and particularly people of color,” she continued.
“They believe, many of them,” she added, “that frankly, police officers were racist, and that the way in which they were dealt with by the police was very much a function of their color.”
Lightfoot added: “We know that saying that every police officer is racist is wrong. Because that’s clearly not true. There are a vast majority of police officers who are out there every day and trying to do the right thing, who came into the job for the right reasons.”
Chicago needs “some kind of racial reconciliation. That hasn’t been something that has been talked about, and I know that’s a little outside of the scope of this body’s current focus. . . . But it’s something that I think this Council really needs to give some serious consideration to.”
The aldermen responded with myriad pressing questions, about the police union contract, community policing and training, and more.
They didn’t go near those “R” words.
The fear of race has become part of Chicago’s DNA. Few want to talk honestly about it. Few want to admit there are racists among us.
Later, Lightfoot took questions from reporters. What do you mean by “racial reconciliation”? I asked.
In board hearings, community meetings, on the streets, she and her colleagues have heard from “people who are traumatized deeply,” she replied.
“When you have middleto upper- middle- class black folks who are doctors, teachers, lawyers, professionals, coming and talking about not being able to walk down their street, not being able to drive in a car in their neighborhood without getting stopped and treated disrespectfully. Or feeling like they are under siege in their own neighborhood. That’s a problem.”
It is having “a corrosive effect on ordinary citizens all across the city.”
These are corrosive times. America’s headlines are dominated by racial fear, from street violence to police shootings. America’s leading presidential nominees, both white, wealthy and privileged, are calling each other bigots, racists, and crooks, with surely far worse to come.
What can we do?
It starts with “small conversations,” she replied, with people “who are at polar ends of the spectrum, from the community, and from the Police Department.”
“And frankly, the fact of recognizing the experiences, particularly of people of color around policing, I think would work wonders.”
Tell stories? “Telling some of the stories and acknowledging, validating the experience, and not dismissing it.”
For more than half a century, Chicago has been dismissing people of color, black and Latino communities on the receiving end of police misconduct, corruption, disrespect and discrimination.
We have to acknowledge the racism to reconcile.