Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has called for paying reparations to African-American residents as a way to prevent them from committing crimes.
Mr. Johnson, who has been mayor for eight months, revealed the plan in a CNN interview on Friday evening going into the holiday weekend. During the interview, he appeared to blame government policies for crimes committed by black Americans, characterizing the need for reparations for those who have been incarcerated “because of failed policies.”
“In order for us to have a better, strong and safer Chicago, it really requires the full force of government,” Mr. Johnson said.
He proposes to pay the reparations out of $100 million already earmarked for violence prevention in the Windy City. He said $500,000 has already been put aside as reparations money to be used to reduce what he called “the cycle of violence” in Chicago.
The proposal has set off a hailstorm of criticism. Just one post on X garnered 3,700 comments from users of the social media platform.
“Reparation has already been paid by the 360,000 soldiers who died fighting to end slavery,” one user who uses the name “LynrdsMom” wrote in an X post.
LA anthropologist Robert Sepher posted: “So white people that never had slaves should pay money to black people that never were slaves in the hopes that the black perpetrators committing a disproportionate rate of crime, rape and murder will allegedly subside. Low IQ woke Afrocentric ”logic“ is running wild in America.”
In a panel discussion on Fox News over the weekend on Mr. Johnson’s reparation plan, contributor David Webb, co-founder of the TeaParty365, referred to his status as a black man in calling out Mr. Johnson’s proposed reparations as “ridiculous.”
“By the way — who gets paid? I’m a black man; do I get paid?” asked Mr. Webb.
Mr. Webb said it was clear that Mr. Johnson was implying that “blacks are the problem, that if you give them some cash they won’t go rob your store.”
“This is what happens when you elect a socialist, and you get someone who is actually a segregationist,” Mr. Webb said. “Because he’s not dealing with the illegal aliens who are in these poor neighborhoods in Chicago, he’s not dealing with the effects of that, the fact that winter is coming in the windy city, things will get worse for people who can’t afford heating, people who can’t afford to take care of themselves, and they don’t do anything about the rising crime because they keep reducing the police force by their policy or the fact that people don’t want to join the force.”
Reparations for ‘Historical Harm’
In July, Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, became the first in the nation to pay reparations to black Americans for “historical harm” to them.Under the program, the city chose to pay $25,000 to qualifying residents. So far, the city has paid out over $1 million in reparations to black residents. To qualify, they or an ancestor had to have lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969.
Justin Hansford, head of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, told the New York Post that he “sees it as a test run for the whole country.”
A Chicago civil rights activist, Bennett Johnson, called the $25,000 not enough and the cutoff date “totally arbitrary,“ saying black people were “discriminated against” long after 1969.
Recipients were also critical. Kenneth Wideman, a 77-year-old Vietnam vet who qualified for the Evanston reparations payout, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying, “We have not received real reparations, the 40 acres and a mule.”
A slavery reparations protest outside New York Life Insurance Company offices in New York City on Aug. 9, 2002. Mario Tama/Getty Images
California Democrats are now pushing to make the Golden State the first state in the nation to pay reparations to black Americans for hardships they allegedly endured as a result of slavery. The proposal led by the California Congressional Black Caucus, however, has been met with significant resistance.
According to a University of California at Berkeley poll, out of 6,000 registered California voters, only 23 percent said they supported paying reparations to African Americans.
Nationally, according to an in-depth analysis of reparations by the Foundation for Research On Equal Opportunities (FREOPP), 80 percent of white Americans are against reparations, while 77 percent of black Americans support a payout.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which advocates for reparations, said that failure to support cash payouts to African Americans for the inflictions of slavery is depriving today’s black community of equal economic opportunities as white people.
“The American Dream implies that through hard work, a person may buy a home, start a company, and build a nest egg for future generations,” the organization wrote in a March 22, 2023, press release. “This concept, however, has been consistently rejected by the United States government’s own regulations that denied African Americans wealth-building opportunities.”
In response to another social media post about Mr. Johnson’s reparation plan, Paul Syzpula, an animator from Cold Springs, New York, wrote, “Reparations are just another form of begging for money for people who don’t deserve it. It’s a rebrand of affirmative action. It’s wrong and couldn’t be more insulting to black people — and all Americans.”
This past year, Chicago has seen a 23 percent increase in robberies, a six percent increase in aggravated robbery, and a whopping 38 percent jump in carjackings.
Police investigate the scene of a shooting near 1324 S Christiana Ave in Chicago's Lawndale neighborhood on July 21, 2021. Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
In response to the carjackings, the city of Chicago filed a lawsuit against automakers of the most frequently stolen cars. In defending the lawsuit, Mr. Johnson suggested that automakers and not the carjackers were responsible for the carjackings.
“The failure of Kia and Hyundai to install basic auto-theft prevention technology in these models is sheer negligence, and as a result, a citywide and nationwide crime spree around automobile theft has been unfolding right before our eyes,” said Mr. Johnson.
Former NYPD police officer Bill Stanton told Fox News on Sunday that he found Mr. Johnson’s proposal especially offensive because it disregards the victims of crimes and officers charged with enforcing laws. He also said the liberal ideology of politicians like Mr. Johnson is also forcing police officers to become “report takers and not crime fighters.”
“This mayor is all he is doing is paying off people for votes to get re-elected,” he said.
