Brandon Johnson’s War on the Black Community

By Paul Vallas

August 15^th, 2025

Mayor Brandon Johnson fashions himself as the successor to former Mayor Harold Washington, presenting his leadership as a new era for Black political power in Chicago. He casts his critics as participants in a national pattern of attacks on Black mayors and claims the city is undergoing a “Reconstruction” moment. This rhetorical framing suggests existential stakes: that entrenched powers seek to quash Black advancement in Chicago.

However, invoking race and systemic racism to dismiss criticism, deflect accountability, or explain away every setback only dilutes the discussion of the real challenges confronting both Chicago and its Black residents. Johnson’s rhetoric is a strategy to silence dissent and regain Black support, especially as many in these communities feel left behind by his migrant policies. In truth, his policies—along with those of the Progressive Caucus—have done far more harm than good in the Black community.

Failing Public Safety

Johnson has consistently minimized Chicago’s crime and violence issues. While the number of murders and shootings have dropped along with national trends since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, overall violent crime remains high.

Chicago reported 28,443 violent crimes in 2024, with aggravated assaults at a 20-year peak.

The city remains notorious for its violence, once again leading the nation in the number of murders, school age youth murdered and mass shootings, with Black residents bearing the brunt—making up the overwhelming majority of victims, including nearly 80% of murders and shootings. Notably, an investigation by CBS news reported Black women account for just over 16% of the city’s population but over 30% of violent crime victims in 2024.

Yet rather than directly condemning the violence, Johnson often pivots to ambiguous references to “institutional racism” as the root cause. Meanwhile, his budgets have left Chicago with 2,000 officers below police strength. Wirepoints reported that in 2023, 52% of high-priority 911 calls went unanswered—up dramatically from 19% in 2019. Arrest rates for violent crimes have dropped below 6%. There are still no robust city, county, or state programs to protect witnesses or victims.

Attacks on Education Choice and Accountability

Johnson’s education agenda was clear from the outset. Like his former employers and chief sponsors at the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), he opposes homework, standardized tests, school choice, and selective-enrollment schools and the mayor appointed school boards have moved to accommodate. Many Chicago Teachers Union leaders, including Johnson himself send their children to private, charter, or magnet schools outside their neighborhoods —with over 30% CPS teachers including the CTU President sending children to private schools.

The CTU led the way with the mayor’s support, in lobbying the non-renewal of the state funded private school scholarship program that benefited over 9,000 largely poor minority children, while costing the school district nothing. The Johnson’s appointed Board of Education approved measures to phase out select-public charter schools enrollment magnet schools-transitioning away from even public-school choice—eliminating high-quality alternatives for many Black students in under-resourced neighborhood.

The school board has also presided over the lowering of academic standards, dismissing standardized testing as “junk science,” and ending the ranking of schools by academic performance. Little wonder that while the district boasts a record 78% graduation rate for Black students Wirepoints reports that only 11% meet SAT reading standards and just 7% math standards. Social promotion policies are dooming thousands of children to poverty and failure as the Mayor, CTU leadership and district administrators embrace the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Meanwhile, the school district significantly shortchanges public charter schools which offer the only alternatives for Black and Latino families to their often failing neighborhood schools by providing them with over $8,600 less per pupil than the district average. In the process the district deliberately discriminates against overwhelmingly poor Black and Latino students who make up 98% of the over 54,000 students who attend public charter schools, according to the Illinois Charter School Association.

Economic Development That Ignores Black Enterprise

Rather than creating conditions for small businesses to flourish, Johnson has focused on expanding government intervention and imposing new costly job killing unfunded mandates. The move to raise the subminimum wage for tipped workers and doubling family leave requirements disproportionately hurts small and minority-owned businesses. According to the US Department of Labor an estimated 5,200 jobs have been lost and 100 restaurants have closed one year after the elimination of subminimum wages. There’s more job losses and restaurant closings to come.

His much-touted “Bring Chicago Home” real estate transfer tax—branded as a “mansion tax”—would have projected to generate 90% of its revenue from commercial real estate, with costs inevitably passed to renters and customers. Though he backed off additional tax proposals, anti-business revenue generating alternatives like the reinstatement of the head tax and increases on hotels and services,

Johnson also pushed an $830 million general obligation bond for affordable housing and infrastructure, but details are thin. To date, the most significant affordable housing investment amounts to $324 million in subsidies for just 505 units—a windfall for politically connected developers, not a broad solution for Black neighborhood.

His support for a multi-billion-dollar Bears stadium plan with $1.5 billion in public subsidies—and approval of $152 million in tax increment financing for downtown development, with a fraction going to “affordable” housing—as a continuation of the practice of prioritizing the politically connected betrays the priorities his progressive coalition expected.

Rising cost of living is punishing Black families.

Despite the Mayor’s claims Chicago is becoming increasingly less affordable city rent and home prices are significantly higher than in previous years. In January 2024, rents were 23.3% higher than in January 2019. Home prices are also rising faster Chicago has some of the highest property taxes in the country, which are passed on to renters through increased rent costs. The cost of groceries, transportation, and other essential items is also on the rise, contributing to the overall cost of living with little prospect for relief.

For all the talk about progressive revenues the increasing cost of government have been finance by everything but. Despite the Mayors talk about holding the line on property taxes his school board has raised property taxes $326 million and according to the Chicago Civic Federation will increase another $230 million next year.

Meanwhile the city has imposed a plethora of inequitable new revenue raising measures not based on income, while proposing measures like a tax on service, a congestion tax and restoration of the sales tax on food and drugs that will hurt the poor most.

Prioritizing Migrants Over Black Residents

The mayor’s migrant policies are at the expense of the Black community as the mayor continues to support Chicago’s sanctuary city policy that openly invites migrants, promising not to cooperate with the federal government on enforcing illegal migration while providing unprecedented handouts to new arrivals seeking asylum. This includes emergency shelter and housing; medical assessments and treatment; legal services; job-readiness support; benefits for victims of serious crimes; enrollment in public schools, among other things.

All told, the city’s spending on the migrant crisis has surpassed $400 million, with some estimates exceeding $600 million. This includes direct city funds and federal grants. This doesn’t include spending by schools which Wirepoints estimate ranges from $212 million to $400 million. Contrast that spending with his other priorities in his quest to overcome historic injustices.

The mayor’s “Treatment not Trauma” program budgets for only 4 mental health centers. The claim of 10,000 new affordable housing units in the pipeline is pure fiction.

Meanwhile, the so-called restored City Department of Environment (DOE) to address environmental racism has no mandate nor resources other than the addition handful of staff to the existing handful of individuals in the Mayor’s Office already dedicated to environmental issues.

Black residents are voting with their feet.

It’s clear that Democratic Party state and local tax and spend policies have and continue to fail the Black community, as they continue to prioritize growth in government and expand government dependency over the type of investment that makes people economically independent. This has left the state the least equitable according to the most recent analysis by WalletHub despite the fact that Illinois residents are the most taxed in the nation, with Chicago residents leading the way. Black residents have responded by voting with their feet.

From 2000 to 2020, Chicago lost 265,000 Black residents, mostly working- and middle-class families with school-age children. The Black child population fell 49% over those twenty years, compared to just 14% for Black adults. People are leaving because of unsafe neighborhoods, lack of quality decent school options, and high taxes and fees.

In conclusion

Equity cannot be realized without safe neighborhoods, high-quality schools, efficient public transit, and policies that foster local wealth-building. Dependency on government is not a path to liberation. Johnson’s record increasingly suggests either a failure to understand these fundamentals or a refusal to prioritize them. Resorting to racial rhetoric as a universal excuse for inherited problems and mounting failures does a disservice to all Chicagoans. The city desperately needs practical, serious solutions over divisive posturing.

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Paul Vallas formerly ran the public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Louisiana Recovery School District. He was a candidate for Mayor of Chicago.

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