There were an unbelievable number of people shot in Chicago over the long Independence Day weekend - reportedly over 100, with roughly 20 deaths. Mayor Brandon Johnson is quoted as saying this.
Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time.
Much of the rest of what he said was the “usual suspects” stuff about poverty and the need to somehow magically alleviate it, total nonsense, of course.
However I write to provide a tiny bit of justification for the quote reproduced above. Sometime during the years between the world wars - probably the 1920s - my father was an investigator for the Los Angeles city prosecutor. Looking back that made him an almost-cop, a near-detective; whether or not he was a sworn officer I have no idea. I was a pre-teen kid when I heard this and didn’t dig into the technicalities.
One thing he told me really got my attention. He said that in the “colored” part of L.A. there was a murder almost every night and that most of these never “made the papers,” weren’t considered newsworthy. This was during a time when murders of whites became lurid, famous cases.
I remember thinking how unfair this was and said as much to my dad. He replied that those deaths didn’t generate public pressure to crack down. Much seems not to have changed in nearly 100 years.
If Mayor Johnson’s black constituents insisted he quell the shooting he could, at the cost of putting a lot of young black gang members in prison. President Nayib Bukele demonstrated this in El Salvador.
