Chicago’s Slavery Reparations

Johnson follows the latest fad rather than fix the public schools

WSJ editorial. 

"Chicago is trotting out its progressive bona fides before the Democratic National Convention in August, and the latest fashion statement is slavery reparations.

Last week Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a new task force to examine “all policies that have harmed Black Chicagoans from the slavery era to present day.” He has earmarked $500,000 in the 2024 budget to study “restoration and reparations.”

Mr. Johnson’s task force will seek to address the way Chicago “perpetuated, condoned, profited and benefitted from the system of chattel slavery,” as well as the Jim Crow laws that followed. The mayor says his administration would look at investments aimed at “rectifying decades of deliberate disinvestment in Black neighborhoods and communities.”

The mayor’s office blames systemic racism for issues including vacant lots, policing failures, industrial pollution, and a homeownership gap. Chicago also has the highest black unemployment rate (12.7%) among the country’s 15 largest cities in 2022 and the widest black-white employment gap. The rate for black workers is more than four times as high as for white workers.

That’s a tragedy, and it’s one that Mr. Johnson’s equity-addled Democratic Party owns. Chicago has been a deep blue city for decades, and the real roots of the problem lie in the city’s rotten education system. Mr. Johnson is beholden to his benefactors at the Chicago Teachers Union who have sinecures at failure factories known as public schools even as they demand more money.

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said recently that conservatives who criticize the union “don’t even want Black children to be able to read,” and “that is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.”

Sorry, conservatives want black children to escape schools where they don’t learn to read. Ms. Gates, by the way, sends her son to private school.

Since 2018 Chicago schools funding has grown 70% per student, according to Wirepoints. Chicago Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said on local station WTTW that the average teacher is making more than $100,000 per year. That’s with summers off and rich pensions. Meanwhile, reading scores have fallen, with 11% of black juniors in CPS proficient in reading on the SAT, down from 14% in 2018. Eleven measly per cent.

If Mr. Johnson wants to pay reparations to black Chicagoans, can the families at least use the money for tuition at private schools?"