Brandon Johnson’s War on the Black Community
By Paul Vallas
August 15th, 2025
Mayor Brandon Johnson fashions himself as the successor to former Mayor Harold Washington, presenting his leadership as a new era for Black political power in Chicago. He casts his critics as participants in a national pattern of attacks on Black mayors and claims the city is undergoing a “Reconstruction” moment. This rhetorical framing suggests existential stakes: that entrenched powers seek to quash Black advancement in Chicago.
However, invoking race and systemic racism to dismiss criticism, deflect accountability, or explain away every setback only dilutes the discussion of the real challenges confronting both Chicago and its Black residents. Johnson’s rhetoric is a strategy to silence dissent and regain Black support, especially as many in these communities feel left behind by his migrant policies. In truth, his policies—along with those of the Progressive Caucus—have done far more harm than good in the Black community.
Failing Public Safety
Johnson has consistently minimized Chicago’s crime and violence issues. While the number of murders and shootings have dropped along with national trends since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, overall violent crime remains high.
Chicago reported 28,443 violent crimes in 2024, with aggravated assaults at a 20-year peak.
The city remains notorious for its violence, once again leading the nation in the number of murders, school age youth murdered and mass shootings, with Black residents bearing the brunt—making up the overwhelming majority of victims, including nearly 80% of murders and shootings. Notably, an investigation by CBS news reported Black women account for just over 16% of the city’s population but over 30% of violent crime victims in 2024.
Yet rather than directly condemning the violence, Johnson often pivots to ambiguous references to “institutional racism” as the root cause. Meanwhile, his budgets have left Chicago with 2,000 officers below police strength. Wirepoints reported that in 2023, 52% of high-priority 911 calls went unanswered—up dramatically from 19% in 2019. Arrest rates for violent crimes have dropped below 6%. There are still no robust city, county, or state programs to protect witnesses or victims.
Attacks on Education Choice and Accountability
Johnson’s education agenda was clear from the outset. Like his former employers and chief sponsors at the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), he opposes homework, standardized tests, school choice, and selective-enrollment schools and the mayor appointed school boards have moved to accommodate. Many Chicago Teachers Union leaders, including Johnson himself send their children to private, charter, or magnet schools outside their neighborhoods —with over 30% CPS teachers including the CTU President sending children to private schools.
The CTU led the way with the mayor’s support, in lobbying the non-renewal of the state funded private school scholarship program that benefited over 9,000 largely poor minority children, while costing the school district nothing. The Johnson’s appointed Board of Education approved measures to phase out select-public charter schools enrollment magnet schools-transitioning away from even public-school choice—eliminating high-quality alternatives for many Black students in under-resourced neighborhood.
The school board has also presided over the lowering of academic standards, dismissing standardized testing as “junk science,” and ending the ranking of schools by academic performance. Little wonder that while the district boasts a record 78% graduation rate for Black students Wirepoints reports that only 11% meet SAT reading standards and just 7% math standards. Social promotion policies are dooming thousands of children to poverty and failure as the Mayor, CTU leadership and district administrators embrace the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Meanwhile, the school district significantly shortchanges public charter schools which offer the only alternatives for Black and Latino families to their often failing neighborhood schools by providing them with over $8,600 less per pupil than the district average. In the process the district deliberately discriminates against overwhelmingly poor Black and Latino students who make up 98% of the over 54,000 students who attend public charter schools, according to the Illinois Charter School Association.
Economic Development That Ignores Black Enterprise
Rather than creating conditions for small businesses to flourish, Johnson has focused on expanding government intervention and imposing new costly job killing unfunded mandates. The move to raise the subminimum wage for tipped workers and doubling family leave requirements disproportionately hurts small and minority-owned businesses. According to the US Department of Labor an estimated 5,200 jobs have been lost and 100 restaurants have closed one year after the elimination of subminimum wages. There’s more job losses and restaurant closings to come.
His much-touted “Bring Chicago Home” real estate transfer tax—branded as a “mansion tax”—would have projected to generate 90% of its revenue from commercial real estate, with costs inevitably passed to renters and customers. Though he backed off additional tax proposals, anti-business revenue generating alternatives like the reinstatement of the head tax and increases on hotels and services,
Johnson also pushed an $830 million general obligation bond for affordable housing and infrastructure, but details are thin. To date, the most significant affordable housing investment amounts to $324 million in subsidies for just 505 units—a windfall for politically connected developers, not a broad solution for Black neighborhood.
His support for a multi-billion-dollar Bears stadium plan with $1.5 billion in public subsidies—and approval of $152 million in tax increment financing for downtown development, with a fraction going to “affordable” housing—as a continuation of the practice of prioritizing the politically connected betrays the priorities his progressive coalition expected.
Rising cost of living is punishing Black families.
Despite the Mayor’s claims Chicago is becoming increasingly less affordable city rent and home prices are significantly higher than in previous years. In January 2024, rents were 23.3% higher than in January 2019. Home prices are also rising faster Chicago has some of the highest property taxes in the country, which are passed on to renters through increased rent costs. The cost of groceries, transportation, and other essential items is also on the rise, contributing to the overall cost of living with little prospect for relief.
For all the talk about progressive revenues the increasing cost of government have been finance by everything but. Despite the Mayors talk about holding the line on property taxes his school board has raised property taxes $326 million and according to the Chicago Civic Federation will increase another $230 million next year.
Meanwhile the city has imposed a plethora of inequitable new revenue raising measures not based on income, while proposing measures like a tax on service, a congestion tax and restoration of the sales tax on food and drugs that will hurt the poor most.
Prioritizing Migrants Over Black Residents
The mayor’s migrant policies are at the expense of the Black community as the mayor continues to support Chicago’s sanctuary city policy that openly invites migrants, promising not to cooperate with the federal government on enforcing illegal migration while providing unprecedented handouts to new arrivals seeking asylum. This includes emergency shelter and housing; medical assessments and treatment; legal services; job-readiness support; benefits for victims of serious crimes; enrollment in public schools, among other things.
All told, the city’s spending on the migrant crisis has surpassed $400 million, with some estimates exceeding $600 million. This includes direct city funds and federal grants. This doesn’t include spending by schools which Wirepoints estimate ranges from $212 million to $400 million. Contrast that spending with his other priorities in his quest to overcome historic injustices.
The mayor’s “Treatment not Trauma” program budgets for only 4 mental health centers. The claim of 10,000 new affordable housing units in the pipeline is pure fiction.
Meanwhile, the so-called restored City Department of Environment (DOE) to address environmental racism has no mandate nor resources other than the addition handful of staff to the existing handful of individuals in the Mayor’s Office already dedicated to environmental issues.
Black residents are voting with their feet.
It’s clear that Democratic Party state and local tax and spend policies have and continue to fail the Black community, as they continue to prioritize growth in government and expand government dependency over the type of investment that makes people economically independent. This has left the state the least equitable according to the most recent analysis by WalletHub despite the fact that Illinois residents are the most taxed in the nation, with Chicago residents leading the way. Black residents have responded by voting with their feet.
From 2000 to 2020, Chicago lost 265,000 Black residents, mostly working- and middle-class families with school-age children. The Black child population fell 49% over those twenty years, compared to just 14% for Black adults. People are leaving because of unsafe neighborhoods, lack of quality decent school options, and high taxes and fees.
In conclusion
Equity cannot be realized without safe neighborhoods, high-quality schools, efficient public transit, and policies that foster local wealth-building. Dependency on government is not a path to liberation. Johnson’s record increasingly suggests either a failure to understand these fundamentals or a refusal to prioritize them. Resorting to racial rhetoric as a universal excuse for inherited problems and mounting failures does a disservice to all Chicagoans. The city desperately needs practical, serious solutions over divisive posturing.
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Paul Vallas formerly ran the public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Louisiana Recovery School District. He was a candidate for Mayor of Chicago.
Comments 40
When our distinguished Mayor mentions “Reconstruction”. 8th grade History textbook regurgitation, and he was teacher. He is right about Chicago being under another “Reconstruction” moment. Because as we all know, including the Mayor, Reconstruction was about One Party Rule. Exactly what the Democrat had planned for us had we lost the last election.
Republicans wanted to own the Black vote back in the day, as Democrats like Johnson do today. Remember Biden “if you don’t vote Democrat, you ain’t Black”.
The Mayor means well, but is trapped within his own indoctrination. He is the new Overseer and he has plenty of company. Standardized testing as “Junk Science” – I get that. You don’t want test scores to be the only thing you value yourself by. But you have to have the tools to survive. Both points of view can compliment each other and very nicely, especially when married with school choice.
Hopefully change is coming to Chicago. I can’t leave, so I will work my tail off for any and all common sense candidates in the upcoming elections here
Mr. Vallas’ commentary here is thoughtful and substantive. Reading it makes this Chicago expatriate recall that a pathetically weak number of eligible Chicagoans participated in the 2023 mayoral election, electing the candidate incapable of thinking sensibly and devoid of any substance.
Chicago should have a theme song now, something more current than “Sweet Home Chicago.” How about a blues arrangement of the “Dies Irae”?
Mr. Bittinger- I didn’t think it would never happen but this time I totally agree with you..
Nothing Mr Vallas says is off base.
But from an accuracy standpoint, let’s stop calling these people migrants or immigrants. They are neither. They are “illegals” ! If that bothers you then simply “occupants”. Migrants and immigrants follow the rules…illegal occupants don’t.
Thank you. Note that the governor the blacks voted for in massive numbers, houses the illegals in his families hotels. I travel substantially, and have changed to Marriott and Preferred.
On the money, Ken!
As Mr. Vallas well knows, education is the key to everything. Chicago is in a designed death spiral. With proficiency rates around 18% average for all grades( an “F” grade, by the way), the uneducated have no way out of poverty. They can’t get decent jobs, can’t make decent money and don’t have the wherewithal to leave the city.
They then become increasingly dependent on government assistance to survive. That is exactly the “Progressive” plan. This is how they keep power. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor in 90 years, but I hear the refrain it’s the mean Republicans or it’s Trump’s fault. I feel for the citizens who can’t afford to leave, but I have no sympathy for those who keep voting the same way every election, expecting different results.
The Chicago Machine would rather partner with Communists than cede any power to a Centrist Democrat or God forbid, a Republican. What they don’t realize is that by partnering, they signed their own death sentence.
It’s over for Chicago. The munibond window will be open but the cost to access it will be very expensive. Taxes will never drop. Pritzker will get re-elected. More Republicans will vote with their feet.
My family and I left in the mid seventies. Greener pastures are everywhere. Thankfully.
Chicago has shown no indication that it rejects the agenda and the consequences of Mayor Brandon Johnson,
Thank you.
After departing Chicago over three years ago, I get a certain whimsical thrill over watching the continual gruel that passes for news out of the once great city, e.g. man shown being “dispatched” on his own live-cam from inside his own car…..a blind man’s dog stolen from his back yard. As much as I whole heartily agree with Paul Vallas’ analysis of the plight of Chicago, I also whole heartily agree with Pat Hickey’s succinct analysis. To quote once again Paddy Bauler’s keen but simple insight, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” “Slow death” should be its motto.
Someone should have proof-read this before publication.
Thank you!
Mr. Krudop.
The editor working alone worked hard on this piece, checking spelling and grammar.
I’m not perfect. We all know this.
Please point out the errors you’ve found here. Or are you trying to protect the mayor?
I’m waiting.
John Kass
What a shame that Paul Vallas didn’t win the last election but BJ is what the voters of Chicago wanted and it’s what they got.
Votes have consequences.
He was a questionable and subpar teacher. Now he masquerades as a mayor. Being a politician has fallen to one rung below used car sales and this man has set his bar to achieve that goal.
It is quite unfortunate that this one gleaming crown jewel of the Midwest has become a nothing more than a rock at the bottomless pit of crime, mayhem, disorder, and corruption.
And the goof with the panic attacks in the chair on the 5th floor is the poorest excuse of a leader.
The very worst part of all of this, is the limousine liberals on the North Shore, and the blacks, will just reelect the clown.
Well said!
Perhaps homicides are down a bit but stats say agg assaults are way up. No one ever mentions the heroic work done at Str0ger, UIC, and other Trauma Centers in and on the edge of the city that look like MASH units on any given weekend (the Saturday night knife and gun club) who are saved by the diligent work of ED Docs, Nurses, support staff and Chicago Fire EMS. Once they are DOA or expire after very expensive lifesaving efforts they do end up on a table at the Medical Examiners Office. They become a murder victim. If they survive they undergo rehab $$$ and may return to the streets. All hidden cost no one EVER discusses. How many are confined to wheel chairs or other disabilities due to the mayhem? And it certainly impacts the black and brown communities disproportionally. But the race hustlers including the Mayor continue to make policy that pushes a narrative. Remember it was the democrats who supported slavery both modern and in the 1800’s. When LBJ created his ‘new society” he broke up nuclear families, and welfare kept minorities enslaved and voting Democrat since the late 1960’s. It’s all about power and money for the connected. The poor are collateral damage to make it happen. Rules for thee but not for me (cf toilet gate and a Florida vacation during the height of COVID for a man who wants to go from leading a failed state to leading the US.). Glad I was able to exit 7 years ago. I was very sad a month ago walking on a Saturday from the River north to Oak Street along Michigan Avenue. Retail on the not so Mag Mile is on life support. Yes we still have tourists but those numbers are shrinking. Ask a middle class Chicagoan when was the last time you went into the Loop or Boul Mich. Response is a blank stare or “are you crazy?”
Should be LBJ’s “Great Society”. Darn spell & grammar corrector.
We escaped years ago. Am a refugee from Roseland. When we go back, we stay out in Burr Ridge, as both our families are in Orland and Villa Park. Haven’t been in the city itself (other than into O’Hare) in years. What a shame. All of this is at the foot of the Democrats and a combination of low IQ voters, and Bozos like the Pritzker family.
Great comment, All so true.
Amazing how Chicago doubles-down on poor leadership. Paul Vallas for mayor!
Intelligent Illinois voters don’t despise their politicians enough yet. Governor JellyBelly just signed a bill to further disrespect citizenship and rule of law by granting student illegal aliens scholastic financial aid citizen status.
“This law is about making sure no student is left behind because of where they were born”, said sponsor Villanueve.
The Marxist left’s leaders eventually empty the public-paid candy store. Illinois is about there now.
The black community has been voting like a block of stone since the era of Dawson and old man Daley. They will continue to do so, as they love the so called free stuff that the Dems offer. Where the productive leave for greener pastures, the bulk of them still give their choice of representatives to the likes of Tiffany Henyard.
Until the voter IQ improves about the level of a toddler, nothing will change. In you sir, they had a choice, but they just couldn’t do the right thing for themselves. They want sympathy, they have none from me.
Equity is a communist buzz word , which negates your argument. Joe Trippe is to blame for all this. he was sent by Preckwinkle to ruin the Vallas campaign from the inside.
Black Chicago voters will vote for Johnson again. they will not leave the Plantation.
‘nuff said. Well done, Mr Vallas
Thanks Paul. Maybe if you hadn’t screwed up your campaign in the final days you would have won and we wouldn’t be stuck with this incompetent jackass. I could go on but to what end.
Paul and Yianni,
As I have said numerous times before on this platform, I fear Chicago is toast…over. Unless Paul, or another sane candidate like him has some magic potion up his sleeve to win another election, I don’t see Chicago coming back. Mayor Pannix and Governor Dumbo continue to destroy the public school system by dumbing down standards, so kids will stay fat, dumb and happy – which grow into fat, dumb, happy and lazy adults. These “stupids” win elections for the leftists, as we’ve just witnessed. Governor Maximus has illusions of grandeur thinking he has a shot at the white house, but with his record, as he presided over Illinois’ destruction, I doubt he’ll gain traction….I pray! Elections have consequences folks, so get out and vote, otherwise you’re all toast!!! Remember Forrest Gump – Stupid is as stupid does!!!
I once respected Paul Vallas and even campaigned for his election as Mayor. I did UNTIL he issued a campaign statement in advance of Governor Ron DeSantis’ invitation by the FOP to speak to their leadership group in Elmhurst in February 2023, prior to the Mayoral election one week later
His statement read:
“There is simply no place in Chicago for a right-wing extremist like Ron DeSantis, and I am disappointed in FOP leadership for inviting him to speak to officers”
Vallas called the most successful Governor in America, who champions the very things he criticizes Johnson for not doing, a right-wing extremist for his strong support of the Police and conservative values.
Vallas’ words mimicked those of Pritzker, Lightfoot, and the Black community because he feared if he openly supported DeSantis’ visit he would not receive the votes of the progressives. He sold his soul and showed himself to be just another spineless politician who will do or say whatever it takes to get votes. Principles be damned.
So true.
Mr. Svilar: I’m betting Mr. Vallas is hoping few if any would recall this “unfortunate” incident. And despite John Kass’ best efforts to canonize Mr. Vallas and provide him a forum, he is, as you point out, just another spineless unprincipled pol. Pick your poison.
Amen
I went over the fence six years ago and escaped to the second fastest growing city in the country here in Texas. Mr.Vallas is absolutely correct, shame he lost the election. He might have been able to stop the death spiral of that city even though the rest of the state is also wrapped in the same shroud. Execrible Democrat politicians are the reason why that entire state is doomed. They are living proof of what happens when you are led by the stupid. Democrats have legalized crime making Illinois the most crime friendly state in the country. Democrat tax policies have driven businesses out of the state. Housing unaffordable. Schools in Chicago are among the worst testing scores in the nation. Texas has a strong Republican party as noted by Greg Abbotts refusal to back down over redistricting. Democrats are kept on their heels thanks to the Republicans. Even so, most of the Democrats here are best described as moderates. By Illinois standards, some would be considered Republicans. The current mayor of Houston, John Whitmire would be considered a moderate Republican in Illinois. With the exception of a few loonies from the Austin region most democrats here are actually common sense people like Illinois Democrats used to be. Illinois Democrats aren’t the party of the Kennedys anymore. This ain’t your grandpa’s Democrats anymore. If this was forty years ago Gus Hall would be their candidate for president. Texas picked up four hundred thousand new voters, many from California and they didn’t move the needle towards the blue zone one bit. As for the Democrats that ran to Illinois to hide from Abbott, most of us want you to keep them. And we’ll even toss in ” Beto O’Rourke” to sweeten the pot. Pretty please?
The CTU brings out the vote in Chicago. The rest of the city’s electorate seems deaf to the egregious leadership of Mayor Johnson. There is no Paul Vallas around to effectively challenge this weasel. Chicagoans are getting the “leadership” they appear to be willing to accept. The sheep are being sheared and they don’t seem to care.
Agree with Al completely. Whoever CTU supports, WINS. CASE CLOSED.
CHICAGO VOTERS ARE IDIOTS. GIVEM POT, MUSIC FESTIVALS AND HIP WOKE FOOD, AND THERE HAPPY.
PATHETIC
Some good points, yet the bigger picture is that Chicago is and always has been a patronage run city that pits the interests of public workers and their families against those in the private sector. The big difference over time is that decades ago the leaders thought it important to provide services to their constituents to stay in power as the private sector was large. Now all that is needed are paychecks and pensions for the patronage er public sector workers supported by an ever increasing tax burden.
The trick has been to first increase the burden on visitors or those who must pass through as much as possible. Then hit all possible sin taxes.
If cuts are necessary start with safety er police then cascade into other core services.
The “progressive” strategy is simple: voters who can’t read, write or add are unable to realize that it’s their elected officials who are ruining their lives. To placate the dimbulbs, progressives have increasing numbers of handouts so their subservient voters don’t rebel against them. The reality here is that “progressives” are “progressing” us back to the Middle Ages.