As shopkeepers and volunteers were sweeping up last week after an overnight looting rampage through downtown Chicago’s ritziest addresses, I already was hearing from taunting emailers like this passive-aggressive troll:
“Can’t wait to see how you spin the blame for this on Trump, the police or white privilege,” wrote a gentleman from Kansasville, Wisc. “Unless you choose to conveniently ignore it as you are wont to do with the ongoing, self-induced carnage in Chicago’s Black communities.”
Thanks. That was helpful. Not.
My reader was referring to the hours of looting and destruction early last Monday when more than 100 people were arrested and 13 police officers injured, police said. Streets were littered with broken glass and items stripped from shelves and racks in the city’s upscale upper Michigan Avenue shopping district and other areas of the city.
“This was straight-up felony criminal conduct,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said. “This was an assault on our city.”
True enough. As a longtime Chicagoan, old enough to remember the riots of the 1960s, the “city on the brink” 1980s, followed by about 30 years of gentrification, I felt nothing short of dismay at the bad news: Here we go again.
When I hear from grumpy suburban and rural wags who echo President Donald Trump in bashing “liberal” urban dwellers, I question whether they really want honest dialogue or just want to show off their racial innocence and vent.
Yet I share with my passive-aggressive reader a frustration with hotblooded extremists who somehow got the wrong message from Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation back in 1966 that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
On Monday evening, peaceful protesters organized by Black Lives Matter Chicago held up a banner outside the Central District station that, in my view, showed how far the young BLM movement has drifted away from the passive resistance of King.
“Our futures have been looted from us,” the banner urged. “Loot back.”
No, please don’t.
“There’s no such thing as a bad protester,” organizer Ariel Atkins told reporters.
“Also, (we’re) demanding that police be defunded. Police should not be here. They should not exist, especially because we’re giving them all this money to beat and terrorize us. We’re giving them all this money when it’s like we’re in an actual pandemic and people need care right now, but you’re giving them police.
“We don’t need police,” she said. “We need care.”
OK, yes, we do have too many inequities in law and household income — bigger gaps between rich and poor than we had in King’s day. But, as King also would point out, there’s a right way and a wrong way to get there.
Today’s BLM movement sounded a lot like the Black Panthers of a half-century ago, when their 10-Point Program called in 1966 for the release of “all Black men” in American jails and prisons because they had not been tried by “juries of their peers.”
Yet, time is an educator. As Richard Pryor exclaimed on his “Live on the Sunset Strip” album after his first visit to a real penitentiary, “Thank God we got penitentiaries!”
“I asked a dude — I said, ‘Why did you kill everybody in the house?’ Pryor recalls. “The guy said, ‘They was home!’ ”
Yet, as I have written many times, we still over-incarcerate nonviolent offenders, particularly Black men, and suspects who are too poor to make bail.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was elected handily in the wake of a long history of police scandals that included torture, cover-ups and federal findings of racial bias.
Now she’s on the hot seat after a Chicago Tribune analysis finds she may have been too lenient in dropping charges against suspects at a higher rate than her predecessor, whom she defeated. Police Superintendent David Brown’s remarks that the looters were “emboldened by no consequences in the criminal system” sounded like a veiled jab at Foxx, who is up for reelection in November.
There are a lot of fingers being pointed in all directions after last week’s mayhem. The buck inevitably stops with Lightfoot, but there is plenty of blame to go around during this hot summer in which protesters sometimes look just like plain old looters.
Clarence Page is a member of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board. Email: cpage@chicagotribune.com.
