It’s personal.
The violence and the chaos, the shouting and the crying, whether on Chicago streets or D.C.’s Capitol Hill, is not just the stuff of TV newscasts and newspaper headlines.
It impacts us all. As a Black businessman, based in Chicago, with major clients in the public sector, how the Federal Government operates – or fails to operate – is of great importance to me. Whether it’s contract delays, slow processing, or nonpayment of invoices, the government’s stability and predictability are a big deal. So is the safety of my co-workers and contracted help as they ply our neighborhoods, cataloging and estimating public works that need to be repaired or replaced.
So we need to take seriously those who warn that American Democracy, as we know it, will come to an end soon unless honesty and peaceful debate are restored to the public square. Closer to home, we need to heed those who know that theft and gunfire will yield only to education and employment.
As to national chaos, journalist Barton Gellman has sounded a loud alarm in the January/February 2022 issue of The Atlantic magazine. “Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of Democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government and violence is a legitimate response.”
Gellman further warns: “There is a clear and present danger that the American Democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging on it. Our two-party system has only one party left willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.”
Gellman’s article analyzing the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol draws extensively from the work of Robert A. Pape, Director of the U. of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats (CPOST). “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence,” Pape told Gellman, “was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s.” So it’s about race, not just election results.
“Replacement” Defacement…
Pape’s CPOST group analyzed the January 6 rioters and found that other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from counties where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-percentage-point drop in the white non-Hispanic population, from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a vital link, and it held up in every state. It also recalls the white power chant from the Charlottesville riot of 2017: “You will not replace us!”
In another CPOST nationwide opinion poll, only one statement won overwhelming support among the 8 percent of respondents – a projected 21 million Americans – who claim Trump won and Joe Biden is illegitimate. Almost two-thirds of this group agreed that African Americans or Hispanic people in our country “will eventually have more rights than whites.”
Gellman humanizes Pape’s stark percentages by conducting a lengthy interview with one Richard C. Patterson, a retired New York City fire department captain and ardent Trump supporter/Biden denier.
Patterson’s background squares with Pape’s research, having lived for years in the Bronx, where the 2020 U.S. Census counted 20,413 fewer non- Hispanic whites than were enumerated in 2010. As a boy, he grew up in Oakland, CA., where he remembers he applied for an opening at the fire department and, by his telling, encountered the unfairness of affirmative action and reverse racism. “So no job for the big white kid. The position went to this little woman who I know failed the test.”
Later in New York, after a woman successfully filed a discrimination suit against the FDNY, Patterson was part of a class being trained to work alongside female newbies. It didn’t go well.
“I look at the 2020 election,” Patterson said, “as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.” He explains that Biden may be straight but that Vice President Kamala Harris was on the ticket purely for racial reasons.
So here we are. Part of the rationale motivating this white fireman – and thousands like him – into dancing the Trump Tango is that he thinks he was once wronged by Affirmative Action. He sees a Black Vice President as “more of the same.” In other words, the violent chaos of January 6 was not just about election results. It was about race, And it was personal.
Closer To Home…
We have a situation closer to home that puts my Black business – and many, many others – in a profoundly menacing bind. It’s the violence that besets Chicago neighborhoods. As a Black-owned professional services construction firm, we are dispatching staff to various schools, libraries, and fire stations on Chicago’s South and West Sides. There the constant volley of shootings and carjackings continue unabated. We’ve always been concerned about staff safety as they navigate collapse-prone scaffolds or faulty flooring, but now it’s about stray bullets and random crossfire. This puts an entirely different spin on things.
Consider just the Hyde Park area surrounding my alma mater. In Hyde Park the random violence has gone out of control. For example, on December 19, 2020, a Lyft driver picked up two passengers near the University and was shot while stopping for a red light. Or just last November when U of C student Shaoxing “Dennis” Zheng was killed. He was just 24 years old, and his alleged killer, just 18, was apprehended while trying to pawn Zheng’s laptop computer.
All of which has prompted University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Ka Yee Christina Lee to announce “expanding investments in research and in community-led initiatives and strategies for violence reduction. Crucially, we will develop ways for university members and community partners to drive the directions that this work will take.”
Sounds promising, especially with Waldo E. Johnson, Jr., Associate Professor and Deputy Dean for Curriculum at the school’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, in the middle of it. Johnson has provided guidance, advocacy, and adherence to the concept of respectful community partnerships. I’m betting he’ll be a quiet genius at the forefront of the University’s response to these issues.
Anniversary Actions…
Clockwise: Trey Baker with President Biden, Dr. Gary Slutkin, Congressman Bobby Rush, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Congressman Danny Davis
As we mark the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, we see chaos still surrounds us. It’s not only Black contractors that are challenged, but all Black-owned businesses such as restaurants reduced to carry-out and online orders, all the while beset by staff shortages due to Covid. We are living in perilous times!
Yet there are positive moves that I – and you – could and should be made to stop the bleeding and begin the healing:
1. Maintain contact with Trey Baker, Black Stakeholder at the White House Office of Public Engagement. He can provide the pulse of the Administration’s reactions and counter-measures to troublesome issues as they arise.
2. Congressman Bobby Rush, proceeding to his final term, can provide info on Infrastructure funding, one of the bright spots on the urban horizon.
3. Congressman Danny Davis has agreed to track the nation’s new $5.3 billion “Evidence-Based Violence Prevention Program” quietly tucked into Biden’s infrastructure plan.
4. Dr. Gary Slutkin led the effort to engage “Interrupters” to stem the tide of violence in Chicago and still backs a focused deterrence approach. In partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council and Arizona State University, his Cure Violence campaign recently ran a virtual training session for journalists in Phoenix on best practices for covering violence-related events.
5. To combat future insurrections, let’s switch to a public health approach to prevent violent extremism and away from security and intelligence experts with their wiretaps and cultivated informants. In a recent NYT op-ed, Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University calls for more social workers, school counselors and teachers, mental health experts, and religious leaders to debunk online lies … and shortstop the violence those lies engender.
Summing Up…
Speaking of changes in our approach to local violence, when I took up the issue with Bobby Rush and others, I was directed to writer Francesca Mari’s suggestions in the New York Review of Books June 10, 2021 issue. “The one (point) that needs to be addressed, before we can take on problems that lead people to violence,” she pointed out, “are matters such as economic, educational, and racial inequality. If you’re not safe, nothing else matters.”
That logic squares nicely with conclusions reached by violence scholar Thomas Abt in his book Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence. Like Congressman Rush, Abt finds that today’s urban “gangs” are really “small informal groups that have limited capacity for highly organized crime … They are from neglected and impoverished communities and are formed mainly in response to other gangs.”
Abt also echoes Dr. Slutkin’s Interruptors strategy by calling for focused deterrence wherein a social worker, community peer, and/or specially trained law officer work in advance with youths prone to violence.
Then again, don’t expect the majority of white folks in Kenilworth, Evanston, or the North Shore to get all riled up with these points. Theirs is a different reality. Even well-off, college-educated Blacks may have a different perspective vis-a-vis the root causes of violence. Crime warrants punishment, etc.
But even Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder could see that, if you have a group of white rioters attacking the nation’s Capitol, in addition to four Chicagoans being shot during one recent week on (gasp) Chicago’s North Side, mayhem assaults us from many angles. January 6 wasn’t so much a mass casualty attack as a recruitment drive for more radicalized Trump supporters. Just as Dennis Zhang wasn’t murdered by a soulless thug so much as a boy bereft of hope in a world bereft of opportunities most of us take for granted.
Please note this is not some historical, political assessment. This is personal. How does one plan and execute a public works consultancy when the very underpinnings of the public sector are under attack? Or when it’s not safe for one’s workers to walk the streets?
These are questions that confront us all. It’s personal. And the best answer, for now, is to STAY SAFE AND STAY WOKE.
Paul King is a construction consultant and member of Chicago’s Business Leadership Council.
