Racism at Chicago’s City Hall Mayor Lightfoot will no longer do interviews with white reporters.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/racism-at-chicagos-city-hall-11621550316?mod=o
Ol’ Jim Eastland must be smiling. The white segregationist Senator from Mississippi until 1978 has a surprising imitator in Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said this week she will no longer do interviews with reporters who are white.
This was no rhetorical slip. Ms. Lightfoot, who is black, said in a two-page written statement that from now on “I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.” She justified her decision as a response to “the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically.
She suggested that whatever negative coverage she receives stems from racial bias. “For the past two years, more often than not, we have debated internally, then chosen to say nothing, to let it go, lest we be accused of whining about negative coverage or of ‘playing the race card,’” Ms. Lightfoot wrote.
“And the truth is, it is too heavy a burden to bear, on top of all the other massive challenges our city faces in this moment, to also have to take on the labor of educating white, mostly male members of the news media about the perils and complexities of implicit bias.” So like the racists of the Jim Crow South, the mayor will now judge journalists solely by the color of their skin.
This should be shocking, but the surprise is how little criticism her statement has received. Perhaps it’s simply taboo these days to criticize a black politician who invokes race as a sword and shield.
So credit to Gregory Pratt, a self-described Latino reporter at the Chicago Tribune, for publicly opposing Ms. Lightfoot’s policy. He protested by cancelling a scheduled interview with the mayor and explained on Twitter that “politicians don’t get to choose who covers them.”
Politicians do often use access as a weapon to favor, or punish, reporters based on their coverage. Yet Ms. Lightfoot’s explicit use of race as a reason for her discriminatory policy may violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. She used government resources to issue her announcement, and she does the same when conducting interviews in an official capacity. Similar lawsuits are pending over the growing number of government grant programs that exclude on the basis of race.
It’s tempting to dismiss Mayor Lightfoot’s overt racism as the act of a foolish local politician. But it’s also a sign of the times. Led by the political left, including the current U.S. President’s elevation of “equity” over equal opportunity, America is again dividing itself by race. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous trend for social comity and democratic consent, and if Ms. Lightfoot’s racist media policy is a guide, it promises to get worse.
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