Chicago: Where the Racism Flows 24-7 Like Shit Out of a Backed Up Sewer
July 19, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The city of Chicago’s water department is responsible for delivering fresh pure water to the residents of Chicago and 125 suburban communities. The stench emanating out of that department should make residents gag. No, it’s not the water that stinks to high heaven; it’s the officials running the department.
An investigation launched into a supervisor conducting private business over city emails uncovered a sewer of racist shit running through the department.
One of the water department official’s emails started with the subject line: “Chicago Safari Tickets.”
“If you didn’t book a Chicago Safari adventure with us this 4th of July weekend this is what you missed,” followed by lists of the number of people shot in South and West Side neighborhoods.
“Remember all Chicago Safari packages include 3 deluxe ‘Harold’s Chicken’ meals a day. We guarantee that you will see at least one kill and five crime scenes per three day tour. You’ll also see lots and lots of animals in their natural habitat. Call and book your Chicago Safari today.”
The report described an email sent out with the subject line “U Know U Be In Da Hood,” with a picture of a “wheelbarrow full of watermelons with a sign stating ‘Apply for a Credit Card. Free Watermelons.’”
The racist garbage was part of a whole package laced with sexist rants against the “kotex mafia.” Black women employees were demeaned as whores and b*’s. Muslims were referred to as “rag head c--- suckers.” And these were the people in charge of water for the city! We know what happened in Flint, Michigan when officials made decisions about the water with callous and criminal disregard for Black and other people’s lives.
This was the racist culture of the department that no one even tried to hide. These emails were sent to multiple high-ranking officials in the department and yet no one raised hell. In fact, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s friend headed the water department and was forced to resign when all this started to come to light. A federal suit was filed over four years ago about the racist culture in the department so the mayor and the city officials cannot begin to claim they did not know. A second suit has since been filed by African-American employees who were routinely denied deserved promotions and subjected to the “n” word repeatedly and retribution if they spoke out against it.
The very fact that this supervisor could be sending out this crude good-ole-boy racist garbage shows what has been not only festering in the open but is now emboldened and unleashed by the ugly white supremacy of the Trump regime.
This is not a vestige of another time. This IS how Chicago works—its racism and vicious apartheid character could rival South Africa.
And if you think it is isolated to one department think again. As this story deepened so did a scandal embroiling the tax assessor for Cook County where Chicago is located. A Chicago Tribune investigation of millions of tax records found that for years, “the county’s property tax system created an unequal burden on residents, handing huge financial breaks to homeowners who are well-off while punishing those who have the least, particularly people living in minority communities.” In a typical example, a homeowner in a predominantly Black community on Chicago’s West Side paid taxes on a two-flat home that the county said was worth $210,000 when in fact it cost $119,000. In Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood a homeowner paid taxes on a house that the county said was worth $787,000. In reality the homeowner paid double that for the house. These are not random “mistakes.” It was systematic and widespread and illegal massive stealing of wealth from the poorest, especially minorities, and essentially giving it to the wealthy. And of course these are the same Black communities, which were preyed upon by the banks with their predatory loans such that the housing crash of 2008 resulted in a huge transfer of wealth out of the Black community. Insult on top of injury. And all of this is built on a rotten foundation of the whole history of vicious and racist segregation pioneered in Chicago running right up to today.
While the county tax assessor is committing wholesale theft from those who can least afford it, the Republican governor of the state is starving the city of much needed resources for basic services like schools, mental health facilities, and basic social services. The austerity disproportionately impacts the communities of the oppressed. Almost three years of literally no state budget has bankrupted non-profit agencies that could not hang on without getting reimbursed by the state for the social services they provided to those in need.
All this is enforced by a CRIMINAL in-justice system. While July 4th fireworks dazzled the city and people partied and picnicked in the “other, more middle class, more white part of the city,” look soberly at the horror inflicted on just one family on the South Side of Chicago for celebrating the Fourth of July while Black. And “everyone knows” that the Chicago Police Department is deeply racist and vicious in its decades of murder, brutality, and literally torture toward the Black community as attested to in major exposure after major exposure. Rahm Emanuel has now backed off getting federal court oversight of the Department of Justice’s already weak reform of the police practices. And this while Trump’s DOJ attorney general, “Jeff KKK Sessions” has met with both the CPD Chief of Police AND the president of the FOP—the FASCIST ORDER OF POLICE. Now they are sending in the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] to carry out high tech repression.
There are days it literally makes you sick to read what is right there to see in the local newspapers ... knowing what this has meant for people’s lives and in the callous, genocidal destruction of a people. You have to be willfully ignore-ant to refuse to face that this is what goes on in Chicago—home of the first Black president and presided over by a Democratic mayor and now being served up to a homicidal, fascist president Trump.
A simple and dead serious question: why should anyone tolerate this one day more when the possibility exists to do away with this through revolution?
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