On a spotlessly clear but unseasonably chilly Monday in May 2011, with a turquoise lake fronting its shoreline and uninterrupted blue backing its iridescent skyline, Chicago looked to those attending the inauguration of its new mayor like it rightly belonged near the top of the list of the most economically powerful cities in the world.1 And yet things were not how they appeared on the surface. The man being sworn in that day, Rahm Emanuel, was taking the helm of a city mired in crippling financial problems. His transition team had estimated that the city faced a $700 million budget shortfall the following year, and that figure did not include unfunded pension obligations or the $700 million deficit afflicting the school system. Chicago’s tax revenues had plummeted. The city had lost more than 200,000 residents in the previous decade, depleting the ranks of taxpayers. The Great Recession also hit hard, eliminating some 30,000 jobs between 2009 and 2010 alone. Chicago was also operating without the critical revenue its parking meters and downtown garages had once provided. Filling this gap was going to take some imaginative, if not supernatural, solutions. Just across the Chicago River from the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, where Mayor Emanuel delivered his first mayoral speech that day, lay a striking symbol of Chicago’s financial troubles: a cavernous 110-foot-diameter, 76-foot-deep hole in the ground, where the world’s second tallest building, the Chicago Spire, was supposed to have stood—before the financial crisis turned it into a local joke and urban legend. Five years later, the hole was still there and its owner, Related Midwest, was paying workers to create an artificial embankment out of dirt to hide the sight of the gaping hole from surrounding buildings. As bad as all this seemed, things could get a lot worse. In fact, a sort of doomsday scenario was lurking in the not-so-distant future, when Chicago would be forced to begin filling an even bigger hole: the nearly $20 billion gap in its public pension funds.
For all these reasons, Emanuel’s transition team had planned a rather low-key inauguration—“festive but not too festive,” the Tribune reported.2 The chosen theme was, ironically enough for this city of stark racial segregation and economic inequality, “togetherness.” The celebrations began on Saturday, May 14, with community volunteering in the neighborhoods—planting flowers and picking up trash—followed by a free concert in Grant Park. The swearing-in ceremony two days later was carefully conceived to project this same earnest spirit of civic unity and responsibility. The music for the event was provided by the Chicago Children’s Choir, a “multiracial, multicultural choral music education organization” formed in 1956 by a white Hyde Park minister to symbolize the ideal of racial unity as the walls of the ghetto were hardening nearby. True to form, the group delivered its own rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” When Mayor Emanuel finally took the podium, after being sworn in by—fittingly enough—Harold Washington’s former floor leader Timothy Evans, now chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, he immediately struck the same tone. “We must face the truth,” Emanuel pronounced. “It is time to take on the challenges that threaten the very future of our city: the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, the cost and effectiveness of city government, and the urgent need to create the jobs of the future.” The reasons why one of the mightiest cities in the world faced such challenges in the first place, Emanuel seemed to imply, had little to do with the city’s political leadership. With former mayor Richard M. Daley by his side, he hailed the Pritzker Pavilion and Millennium Park surrounding it as symbolic of a new Chicago: “Through Mayor Daley’s vision, determination and leadership, this place, like our city, was reborn.”
The inauguration was neither the time nor the place to lay blame for Chicago’s fiscal woes, and even if it was, Emanuel, who had been initiated into Chicago politics by Richard Daley back in 1989, was not about to go biting the hand that had fed him. This he would do in the turbulent years to come, when, for example, he would refer to Daley’s parking meter privatization deal as a “lemon” that constituted “a bad deal for our city and a bad contract for our residents.” For now, another kind of moral to the story was being constructed out of all this celebration of togetherness and civic duty. With little to go on in terms of an explanation about the causes of the quagmire the city now faced, Chicagoans, in some sense, were left with only themselves to blame. What else could explain all of the exhortations to residents to do their part in pulling together and improving the city? In the spirit of the neoliberal age, Emanuel called on parents to help solve the problem of failing schools through better parenting and on ordinary residents to help police deal with the problem of rising homicide rates in low-income neighborhoods by being better informants. “So today, I ask of each of you, those who live here, and those who work here, business and labor: let us share the necessary sacrifices fairly and justly,” the mayor said. If this sounded a lot like a prelude to austerity, that’s because that is exactly what it was.
And yet a very different message was being conveyed to Emanuel’s coterie of VIPs, who, for $50,000 could buy the status of inauguration “co-chair,” a deal that included a seat on stage at the Pritzker Pavilion and access to a swish reception at the Venue 1 event center in the West Loop. The message of the shadow inauguration was that there was still plenty of money to be made in the new era of austerity, and the old rules would still apply. As Richard M. Daley’s senior strategist and chief fundraiser during his first successful election campaign, Emanuel had effectively ushered in the age of pinstripe patronage in Chicago. In 2010 he had used his old Rolodex to amass an $11.8 million campaign fund, a new record in Chicago politics, with sizable donations from folks like Steven Spielberg, Donald Trump, and future Illinois governor Bruce Rauner. This was four times the amount raised by his closest competitor Gerry Chico, Daley’s chief of staff between 1992 and 1995 and a former president of both the Chicago School and Park District boards, and more than twenty-five times the amount raised by the leading black candidate, former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun. Even if Emanuel only managed 55 percent of the vote against a listless field of challengers, he had demonstrated that he clearly meant business, and business took notice.
It was thus no surprise that despite branding himself as the candidate of change during the campaign, Emanuel effectively picked up where his predecessor had left off. If something was new, it was the pace and intensity of austerity. Daley had wrangled with the Amalgamated Transit Union over who should pay to fill the chronic operating gap ($155 million in 2009) of the country’s second largest public transit system, imposing budget constraints that led to significant service cuts, fare hikes, and the laying off of over one thousand workers in 2010. But this was mere child’s play compared with the slash-and-burn austerity program Emanuel unleashed. Emanuel’s 2012 budget, approved by a 50–0 vote of the city council contained “reforms and efficiencies” that would save taxpayers more than $406 million. The reforms and efficiencies, however, came with some crushing social costs. Chicago shuttered six out of its twelve mental health clinics, closed its neighborhood branch libraries on Mondays, and laid off some 32 percent of the city’s library workers. Needless to say, most of the mental health clinics closed were located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, like Woodlawn, Logan Square, and the Back of the Yards—the same kinds of communities that had been most affected by the recent CTA service cuts. Patients transferred to the far North Side began complaining that hour-long commutes were deterring them from seeking treatment.
However, the full brunt of Emanuel’s austerity program did not hit the city until after the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) dared to challenge it in September 2012, when it rallied 26,000 teachers and support staff to conduct the first teachers’ strike in the city in twenty-five years. While the Emanuel administration portrayed the strike in bread-and-butter terms, the salary and health-care cost issues were, in reality, less contentious than a range of other matters. The teachers took to the streets in large part to oppose Emanuel’s grand scheme—inherited from Daley and his schools CEO Arne Duncan—to overhaul Chicago’s public education system by closing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. In particular, the CTU challenged the new rules and practices established by Illinois legislators at the behest of Mayor Emanuel to help pave the way towards privatization—for example, a layoff process dependent on teacher evaluations rather than seniority and an evaluation process, in the spirit of the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, based partly on student performance on standardized tests.
After a seven-day walkout that paralyzed the nation’s third largest school system, the CTU won enough concessions from the city to claim victory—among them, a modest pay increase over the next four years, a limited right of recall for displaced teachers, the maintenance of a pay schedule based largely on seniority, no increase in health care costs, an evaluation system that followed the minimum state requirements for using student performance on standardized tests, and the right to appeal teacher evaluations. CTU president Karen Lewis referred to the deal as an “austerity contract,” pointing to the fact that the 17.6 percent salary increase was much lower than the 30 percent sought.
But this was only phase one of the austerity offensive against Chicago public schools and the communities depending on them most. The following May, Emanuel’s school board voted 6–0 to approve his plan to close forty-nine elementary schools, most located in black neighborhoods, a move that would entail laying off some 3,000 teachers and school personnel and forcing some 12,000 students to walk longer, and at times more dangerous, routes to school. Although school closings were sweeping the nation at the time—Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission had recently voted to close twenty-three, for example—this was the biggest single round of them in U.S. history. Then, in August 2013, the school board voted 7–0 to approve a budget plan that slashed individual school budgets by 10–25 percent, a steep cut that would force the elimination of school libraries (160 schools in the city already lacked them), a sharp reduction in special education and guidance counseling services, the gutting of physical education and art and music programs, and a virtual halt on physical improvements like the badly needed installation of air conditioning.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, during his stint as President Obama’s chief of staff, told a room full of corporate chief executives in November 2008.3 Five years later, he was practicing what he preached. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein highlights how champions of free market reforms capitalized on the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina to privatize the New Orleans school system—a striking example of what she refers to as “disaster capitalism.”4 While Chicago did not have hurricane winds or floodwaters to help its privatization program along, the Emanuel administration conjured up its own crisis with school closings and deep budget cuts, rationalizing them as a painful but necessary way to deal with a now $1 billion school-operating deficit and an underfunded pension system. It was yet another doomsday scenario, following in the footsteps of the ones that had justified CTA cuts under Daley and the litany of austerity measures enacted by Emanuel during his first years in office. Yet this particular scenario was about more than just balancing the budget. Emanuel and the school board intended to induce a real crisis that would validate the transfer of schools to the private sector. With their budgets worn down to the bone, public schools were now bound to demonstrate the failings that the champions of charter schools had always attributed to them. Far more than his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel understood the brave new world of disaster capitalism. Austerity, for Emanuel, was not merely the backdrop for normal business affairs; it was a powerful wellspring of economic activities and, as such, a critical source of patronage.
But those working amidst the rubble of this policy-induced catastrophe—namely, the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union—were not buying the crisis idea for one minute. If Emanuel had inherited a political landscape shaped over the decades by neoliberal sensibilities and forms of governance, he also faced some new conditions. Like his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, Emanuel tried to use budgetary smoke and mirrors, but many Chicagoans had peeked behind the curtain and seen that the mighty wizard was a fraud. Unimpressed by Emanuel’s appeal for sacrifice in the midst of crisis, the CTU called for the mayor to use TIF funds to fill the budget gap and argued quite persuasively that a small tax on transactions made on the city’s financial exchanges would quickly and easily fill the budgetary gap.
The groundswell of opposition to Emanuel’s austerity education budget had been gradually building under the radar since the last few years of the Richard M. Daley era. After the CTU had failed to muster citywide opposition in 2006 to the school closings initiated by Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan, a number of disgruntled teachers within the union began to join forces and to reach out to grassroots organizations in areas affected by school closings, such as the Pilsen Alliance, the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), and Blocks Together, a community organization in the Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood. By 2007, the group, led by high school history teachers Jesse Sharkey and Jackson Potter, had launched a regular forum on the school closings and convinced the CTU leadership to form a committee to address the issue. Although union leadership would swiftly abandon the cause, the teachers pressed ahead, continuing to collaborate with community organizations in neighborhoods threatened by school closings. In 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, members of the group, which now called itself the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), read Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, engaging in a discussion of its ideas which, according to Potter, was like “a light bulb going off.”5 In May 2010, with Karen Lewis as its presidential candidate, CORE triumphed in a runoff election against the United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which had controlled the CTU for thirty-six of the previous forty years.6 True to the organizing and ideological approach that had catapulted the movement forward from the start, CORE immediately moved the issue of publicly funded corporate subsidies and the tax increment financing (TIF) system to the center of its agenda. “Corporate America sees K–12 public education as a $380 billion trust that, up until the last ten or fifteen years, they haven’t had a sizable piece of,” Lewis asserted following her election. “What drives school reform is a singular focus on profit. Not teaching, not learning—profit.”7 Such views about Chicago’s school system had not been voiced so loudly and clearly since the days of Margaret Haley. The CTU had become the catalyst for a broad-based multiracial movement, and Karen Lewis was quickly being bandied about as a legitimate challenger to Emanuel in the upcoming election.
Anticapitalist rallying cries were not confined to the teachers’ movement. Outrage over TIFs and pinstripe patronage was increasingly being vented by neighborhood groups and political organizations dealing with affordable housing, immigrant rights, access to health care, homelessness, violence prevention, and other issues. Chicago was witnessing the emergence of a citywide movement of grassroots organizations soldered together by a sense of common struggle against the stark inequalities created by the long-standing collusion between City Hall and the downtown business crowd. When Richard M. Daley announced he would not be seeking reelection in September 2010, a new feeling spread through the ranks of activists leading the charge: hope. “The Daley legacy was so deep because people thought Chicago could never change,” remarked Amisha Patel, the executive director of Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of labor and community groups.8 In December, Grassroots Collaborative looked to channel this new spirit by organizing a mayoral candidate forum, called New Chicago 2011, which drew 2,600 people representing more than thirty community organizations across the city.
Grassroots Collaborative was strikingly successful in bringing together unions and community organizations, including the CTU, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Action Now Institute, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, and Organizing Neighborhoods for Equality: Northside (ONE Northside). Rahm Emanuel’s campaign announcement just weeks after the collaborative came together might have “crushed [the] moment”—in the words of Patel. But the movement pushed forward, picking up new momentum with the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement nationwide. On October 10, 2011, with Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out in the financial district along LaSalle Street, the new face of the Chicago left revealed itself. Four thousand protesters joined the Take Back Chicago marches on the Chicago Art Institute, where members of the financial futures trading industry were attending a reception for the 27th Annual Futures & Options Expo. Some four months later, in February, Grassroots Collaborative and Stand Up! Chicago, another labor-community coalition, coordinated the famous “golden toilet” demonstrations to protest the granting of $15 million in TIF funds to the CME Group in 2010 for the purpose of rehabbing bathrooms, upgrading the cafeteria, and building a fitness center at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. As a result of the pressure, CME Group chairman Terrence Duffy promptly announced the company would return the money. Duffy was not alone in feeling the heat. In early March, the White House suddenly announced that the Group of Eight (G8) meeting that was to take place in Chicago in mid-May would be moved to Camp David to avoid disruptive protests.
And yet, as the dust settled from this whirlwind of contentious politics that whipped through the city during this moment of regime change, Mayor Emanuel started, undaunted and relatively unimpeded, down the road paved by the neoliberalization agenda of his predecessor. In addition to keeping the school privatization program on track, with the approval of eleven charter school openings in the fall of 2014 and seven more in the fall of 2015, Emanuel’s handpicked school board voted to authorize $340 million in contracts to two private firms, Aramark and SodexoMAGIC, to provide custodial and building maintenance services to the Chicago Public Schools. Shortly after the start of Aramark’s contract, a survey of principals indicated shortages of supplies, dirtier schools, and teachers spending more time cleaning their classrooms. Then, after the story broke and Emanuel told Aramark to “clean out the schools or . . . clean out their desks and get out,” the company announced it was laying off 476 custodians. The school board wiped its hands of the affair, claiming the privilege of public unaccountability that neoliberal governance bestows. “It’s not actually CPS laying off the custodians,” CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey told the press. “It’s the private contractors that work for us.”9
But far bigger problems were coming to light as the school board sped ahead on its seemingly inexorable drive towards a privatized future. In December 2013, Juan Rangel, cochairman of Emanuel’s 2011 campaign, was forced to step down from his post of executive director of the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) amidst a federal securities probe into its use of a $98 million state grant to build charter schools—believed at the time to have been the largest government subsidy for charters in the country. The grant was merely a portion of a total of $280 million in state funds allocated to UNO between 2009 and 2014, enabling a small neighborhood organization devoted largely to housing and immigrant rights issues in the Pilsen-Little Village area to grow into the city’s biggest charter school operator and the largest operator of Hispanic charter schools in the nation. Emblematic of the interplay of race and neoliberalization in Daley’s Chicago, Rangel had effectively parlayed UNO’s ethnoracial legitimacy—carefully cultivated by his predecessor Danny Solis—to make the organization (and himself) indispensable to Daley and then Emanuel after him. UNO would serve as middleman and fixer as the city imposed charter schools on its Latino communities, and with every charter school UNO opened, City Hall would gain legions of teachers, janitors, administrators, and parents in these communities who were, in one way or another, loyal to it. All this the CTU understood and it cried foul. But the advance of charter schools continued unabated.
Indeed, Emanuel’s first term in office witnessed a litany of scandals and mishaps related to the city’s privatization deals: Aramark’s incompetence, Rangel’s improprieties, and the rampant malfunctioning of the Chicago Transit Authority’s new privatized fare collection system, Ventra, which ended up costing the city $519 million ($65 million more than expected). Yet City Hall’s belief in the private sector as holding the solution to all its problems never wavered, even for a moment.
The Emanuel administration also ignored the tough talk about the injustices of the TIF system within the ranks of Chicago’s new anticapitalist insurgency, not wavering in the least in its determination to keep funneling a disproportionate amount of TIF funds into the Loop while denying the areas most in need of them of their proper share. Between 2011 and 2015, almost half the $1.3 billion in TIF financing earmarked by the Emanuel administration went to the Loop district, an area that holds only 11 percent of Chicago’s population and accounts for just 5 percent of its geography. The South Side, by contrast, received about 16 percent of TIF funds, the West Side only 9 percent, and the Southwest and Far South Sides just 4 percent each.10 Moreover, TIF funds in the Loop went to projects that created few new jobs for residents of the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods during a time when the position of young African Americans in Chicago’s labor market was particularly weak. In 2014, 47 percent of African Americans aged 20–24 were out of school and out of work, compared with just 31 percent in New York and Los Angeles. By contrast, only 10 percent of white Chicagoans in this same age group were unemployed and out of school.11
Perhaps the most controversial of Emanuel’s TIF projects during his first term was his authorization of $55 million to subsidize the construction of a new 10,000-seat arena for DePaul University’s basketball team. When the project was announced in May 2013, protesters took to the streets to demand “money for schools, not for stadiums.” Under pressure, Emanuel rearranged the financing scheme so that the city would pay for the acquisition of land for both the arena and surrounding hotels rather than for the construction of the arena itself. The opposition fizzled. At the ground-breaking ceremony more than two years later, the whole matter had become, in the words of Third Ward alderman, Pat Dowell, “a non-issue.”12 Dowell, who represented a ward that was two-thirds African American and who was by the end of 2014 voting with the mayor’s agenda nearly 90 percent of the time, supported the project, at least in part, for the 7,500 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent jobs it promised to bring to her constituents. But it was unclear how many of those jobs would be stable and well-paid enough to support working-class families in Third Ward neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Grand Boulevard, and Fuller Park.
The DePaul arena deal raised other troubling questions. Should the city subsidize an institution with an endowment approaching half a billion dollars when it was facing serious budget gaps, especially after Moody’s Investors Service had downgraded Chicago’s debt rating to junk grade? Not long after the city council voted almost unanimously—just three nays recorded—to approve the subsidy, it authorized a number of regressive fee and tax increases on telephones, cable television, and parking—all on top of Chicago’s sales tax, one of the highest in the country.13 In other words, the city council was approving measures to extract regressive taxes from its citizens while supporting wealthy private institutions.
Hence, if the CTU strike had appeared to usher in a new anticapitalist militancy among the ranks of community activists, the spirit of the rebellion barely touched Chicago’s aldermen, who, according to political scientist and former alderman Dick Simpson, continued to wield a “rubber stamp.” Between June 2011 and November 2014, the city council supported the mayor on divided roll call votes 90 percent of the time. Even the eight aldermen belonging to the so-called Progressive Reform Caucus proved reliable supporters of the mayor’s program, siding with his proposals an average of 67 percent of the time.14
Much has been made of the tactics of intimidation, blackmail, and subterfuge that Emanuel—like Daley before him—employed to command the obedience of aldermen. And yet such factors go only so far in explaining the city council’s abdication of its role as legislative body and check on executive power during Emanuel’s first term. Ultimately, progressives on the city council were unable to muster enough support to challenge the mayor’s policies because there was simply not enough public pressure coming from the wards that were on the losing end of them—and this despite the fact that these years saw the unions, a range of community organizations, and a pesky, talented group of investigative journalists in Chicago’s mainstream and independent press unveiling the workings of pinstripe patronage and the neoliberal agenda like never before.15 To be sure, Chicago’s political culture had been reshaped by the CTU strike of 2012. But it had not been transformed in any significant way. The new insurgent style of grassroots coalition building that had crystallized around the CTU strike seemed to hold great potential, but such forms of political mobilization were difficult to normalize and sustain. The city’s emerging progressive forces watched helplessly as the school board rubber stamped the school closing plan—in spite of a series of emotional public hearings—and as the city council rubber stamped just about everything that came before it. Consequently, the fatalism of old started to set in once again.
And yet some new glimmers of hope appeared in the mayoral and aldermanic elections of February 2015, when county commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García mounted a formidable challenge to Rahm Emanuel. García, the son of a Mexican farm laborer who became alderman of the heavily Mexican Twenty-Second Ward before moving on to the Illinois State Senate, managed to take enough votes (34 percent) to prevent the incumbent Emanuel from winning an outright majority. While García’s ability to force a mayoral runoff race—the first in the city’s history—against an incumbent who had outspent him by more than twelve times suggested that the insurgency was still alive and well, perhaps even more important was the success of the city’s progressive aldermen. Chicago Forward, the super-PAC created by Emanuel supporters to defeat opposition to the mayor’s policies, had funneled substantial funds to a number of pro-Emanuel candidates, but progressive incumbents had prevailed nonetheless. Progressives drew support and funds from grassroots organizations like United Working Families (UWF) and Grassroots Illinois Action (GIA). UWF, in particular, claimed to have knocked on over 153,000 doors and made over 70,000 phone calls.
With Bill de Blasio’s triumphant 2013 “tale of two cities” campaign in New York’s last mayoral election lingering in the air, Chicago seemed once again poised for some real change. In the weeks leading up to the runoff, García’s campaign sought to script the “two cities” story for Chicago as well, referring to Emanuel by his oft-heard nickname: “Mayor 1%.”16 Emanuel countered by reminding working-class voters that he had created jobs, raised the city’s minimum wage, extended the availability of preschool and full-day kindergarten, and renovated playgrounds throughout the city. The New York Times called the race “a test of liberalism” for the whole country.17 When the results of the runoff election were tallied some six weeks later, few but the most naively optimistic expected any real change in the years to come. Emanuel captured just under 56 percent of the vote in an election that had—in comparison to recent mayoral elections in Chicago and other big cities—witnessed a somewhat respectable 40 percent rate of voter participation. The mayor would head into this second term with a moderately more unruly city council, but there was no doubt that the status quo had been convincingly defended.
In addition to his bloated war chest and his endorsements from President Barack Obama, legendary Chicago congressmen Luis Gutiérrez and Bobby Rush, the Chicago Defender, and the vast majority of black ministers and business leaders, all of whom lined up with the Democratic Party establishment, no small amount of good fortune had contributed to Emanuel’s victory. Karen Lewis was, in fact, supposed to have been his challenger, and early polls had showed her running strongly. But after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, Lewis was forced to withdraw, and her heartfelt endorsement of García was no compensation. Even with endorsements from Lewis, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and the leading black mayoral candidate Willie Wilson, García struggled to win the support of black Chicagoans. Despite the school closings and budget cuts and despite the autocratic way the mayor had imposed them on black communities, Emanuel garnered nearly 58 percent of the black vote and carried every single black-majority ward. Turnout in black wards was especially low. The four wards that recorded turnouts under 30 percent—the Sixteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Eighth—were all between 69 and 86 percent African American.
García, who came with cred in the black community for having played an active role in Harold Washington’s multiracial coalition, was simply unable to get out the vote in the black wards, as many had hoped. García’s detractors pointed to a number of reasons why he had failed to inspire African Americans. The candidate had spoken vaguely about favoring “the neighborhoods versus downtown” but had never given black communities any tangible sense of what would change for them under his leadership. And in the aftermath of the August rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri, when the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence was spreading across the nation, García had been reluctant to address police-community issues. Unbeknownst to García was the fact that just days before he had announced his candidacy, a Chicago police officer had been filmed by a dash cam shooting a seventeen-year-old black youth name Laquan McDonald sixteen times as he was walking away. News of the incident would not leak until after the election—another “stroke of fortune” for Emanuel, who denied being aware of the matter until much later.
But Chicago provided no shortage of issues in the run-up to the election that García could have seized upon to prove his mettle to African Americans. His campaign was lethargic in its support for reparations for survivors of police torture at the Area 2 headquarters, and he remained largely silent about allegations of illegal detentions and physical abuse against black suspects at the Chicago Police Department’s secret facility in the abandoned Sears and Roebuck complex in Homan Square. García was clearly out of step and out of touch with the new spirit of activism that was emerging in black Chicago around the time he launched his campaign. The grand jury decision not to indict the officer who had shot Michael Brown in Ferguson unleashed widespread anger in black Chicago about decades of rampant police misconduct. The underlying conditions of such anger were dramatically revealed in the fall of 2015, when the Invisible Institute, a group of journalists and lawyers, released a vast database of police misconduct complaint records. The findings were stark to say the least: the CPD had taken some form of disciplinary action in just 2 percent of the nearly 29,000 allegations of misconduct between 2011 and 2015. While blacks filed most of the complaints, those filed by whites were more likely to be upheld.18
In the weeks after the Ferguson verdict, a number of black political organizations began channeling frustrations about the situation in Chicago. Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization of young students and activists that had come together with the help of University of Chicago political science professor Cathy Cohen and a grant from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, rallied hundreds of protesters against police violence against African Americans for marches and a half-day sit-in at City Hall. Then, in February 2015, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression launched a series of protests at the Chicago Police Department facility in Homan Square. Meanwhile, a coalition of South Side organizations, including Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), and Students for Health Equity (SHE) stepped up a campaign to force the University of Chicago to add a level-1 trauma center to the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC)—a struggle that had begun in 2010, after an eighteen-year old Woodlawn resident and activist, Damian Turner, had been hit by a stray bullet during a drive-by shooting and died ninety minutes later, following a long ambulance ride to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in the North Loop.19
Yet regardless of García’s miscues in appealing to black voters, the fact that his two-cities campaign failed revealed the limits of the multiracial coalition-building strategy that seemed so promising after the CTU strike of 2012. Chicago continued to be an ethnoracially balkanized city with an autocratic mayor, a powerless legislature, and a political culture that was, in the final analysis, stubbornly resistant to the kinds of appeals to social injustice that activists were betting the future on. Ordinary blacks and Mexicans remained as separated in the political sphere as they were in the city’s social geography, and appeals to shared injustices visited upon the working class by an alliance of political leaders and business elites were failing to close the gap.
Just as importantly, middle-class and wealthy whites in the city remained as unmoved as ever about the social and economic injustices they read about in the papers. In an election that had clearly pushed such issues to the center of the debate, Emanuel crushed García in the twelve majority white wards with the highest median income, amassing a 51,492-vote margin, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of his citywide margin of 64,722 votes. In other words, most whites seemed convinced that privatization, austerity, and brutal police tactics were the best remedies for the black and brown working-class communities of the other Chicago. In view of Chuy García’s rather measured challenge to the economic order—his reluctance to criticize Emanuel’s austerity measures, his support of further public sector cuts, and his lukewarm support for a financial transaction tax (FTT)—the extent of his weakness among middle-class whites was remarkable, a sign that many whites still invested in cultural explanations of poverty in the other Chicago.
By the fall of 2015, when a range of local black organizations identifying with the Black Lives Matter movement rallied thousands to hit the streets in response to the revelations surrounding the Laquan McDonald shooting, the city’s racial fault lines widened even further. These protests seemed to usher in a new phase of racial mobilization that moved away from the multiracial coalition-building approach that had crystallized around the CTU strike of 2012. As understandable as this shift was, in view of the unbearable state of police-community relations in black Chicago, it had the unfortunate consequence of dampening the kinds of anticapitalist mobilizations and critiques that had seemed to possess such transformative potential years earlier. Moreover, there were some strong signs that the movement against racist police violence had trouble attracting the support of both Latinos and whites. A Pew Research Center Survey conducted in early spring of 2016 found that only 15 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of whites claimed to “strongly support” the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Perhaps even more suggestive, a mere 33 percent of Hispanics expressed any support at all for BLM, a total that lagged well behind the 40 percent recorded for whites.20
In Chicago, moreover, the rift between blacks and Latinos was further complicated by the fact that, after forcing the firing of police superintendent Garry McCarthy, black protesters began directing their demands for justice at Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, a product of the Mexican community of Pilsen, who had become the first Latina to hold her position. The following March, Alvarez lost badly in a reelection bid to Kim Foxx, an African American who had grown up in the Cabrini-Green housing project. With Foxx backed by Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, one of black Chicago’s most influential political leaders, and Alvarez backed by most of the city’s Hispanic establishment, the election emblematized the political uses of the ethnic patronage game that had been perfected by the Daley administration and handed down to Emanuel. Daley may not have fully understood back in 2008 how his slating of a Mexican American as the county’s top prosecutor, and thus the head of his own local war on drugs and gangs, would play out in the years to come. But the move was now paying dividends for his successor, who was grateful for the diversion. With criticism of the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of African Americans mounting nationwide, it would be a Mexican American who would come to symbolize the punitive excesses of such policies in Chicago.
Foxx would have her work cut out for her, as would Chicago’s new police superintendent Eddie Johnson. Murders and shootings in Chicago surged by roughly 50 percent in the first six months of 2016 compared with the previous year. Such circumstances would only make matters worse for activists seeking to revive opposition to the neoliberal agenda. With working-class black communities backed against the wall in a desperate struggle for security on the streets and Mayor Emanuel embarking upon another four years of austerity and privatization, Chicago moved towards an uncertain future.