Mayor Brandon Johnson sat onstage at a cavernous Woodlawn church and shot back at the criticism that he only cares about hiring Black people with his most forceful defense yet of the representation among his top appointees.
Addressing a Black audience last week, he quoted the Rev. Jesse Jackson: “Our people hire our people.” Then one by one, he shouted out six of his Black deputies and a Black-owned business recently awarded an airport contract.
Less than 24 hours later, his remarks reached the walls of President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, triggering an investigation into City Hall’s hiring practices.
But while Trump’s crusade against diversity policies that he views as discriminatory against white Americans is unprecedented, the practice of powerful officials hiring from within their own ethnic group is a tried-and-true tradition in the bare-knuckle arena of Chicago politics.
Long before DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, entered the political lexicon, the city’s various racial groups each approached the power struggle for jobs with the ethos of “Where’s mine?” Johnson, while maintaining he’s looking out for the entire city, has also argued that now it’s Black residents’ turn.
“Why wouldn’t I speak to Black Chicago? Why wouldn’t I?” the mayor challenged reporters when asked about the DOJ probe last week. “It would be shameful if I were to repeat the sins of those who have been in this position before because they did not speak enough to Black Chicago.”
Patronage — a ‘natural reaction’?
Former Ald. Ed Vrdolyak, a ringleader of the white opposition to Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, once laid out Chicago’s ethnic political principles in stark terms, as an outsider taking stock of the Daley clan’s decades of iron control of the city’s levers of power.
“You’ve got to understand something about the Irish, the Daley Irish,” Vrdolyak told the Tribune in 1996. “It’s the Irish first, and everybody else is a Polack. Everybody. I’m Croatian, and to them I was a Polack. The Blacks are Polacks. Latinos, everybody … are Polacks. That’s how they are.”
Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, the most veteran sitting member of the City Council, chuckled recently when he heard the quote. “Isn’t that something? This is real talk in Chicago.”
“We keep going through this evolution of who gets the short end of the stick,” said Burnett, who is Black. “And when you have been oppressed and neglected for such a long time, you know you are going to continue to try and get more. It’s just a natural reaction.”
During the 20th century, European immigrants came to Chicago in waves, with each group starting from scratch when it came to amassing economic and political might. Longtime white Chicagoans often didn’t accept the newcomers at first, but eventually the burgeoning populations of Irish, Italians, Polish and others established their own unique enclaves across the city.
Most famously, the Irish American Daley family came into power and built a formidable political machine from the 11th Ward in Bridgeport, making a point to hire and promote other Irish Chicagoans. Other white ethnic groups such as the Polish did the same.
That reward system came under fire in the early 1970s under Mayor Richard J. Daley, when federal courts issued a series of orders prohibiting patronage employment in Chicago. They were known as the Shakman decrees.
The DOJ probe into Johnson hinges on whether he “made hiring decisions solely on the basis of race,” in potential violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to a notice issued by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
Flashback: Chicago’s Council Wars pitted defiant white aldermen against a reform-minded Harold Washington
Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, bucked the status quo by recruiting a coalition of Black and Latino aldermen to counter Vrdolyak and other white ethnic members of the Democratic machine who tried to thwart him, in a period known as Council Wars. After Washington’s death in office in 1987, however, that so-called Rainbow Coalition waned as Mayor Richard M. Daley took over in 1989.
Daley assembled his own alliance of ethnic whites and Latinos as the 1990 decennial ward remapping process loomed to prop up a wedge against a growing Black influence at City Hall. Latino hiring did surge, thanks to the Daley-allied Hispanic Democratic Organization — until a federal investigation into its patronage hiring practices kneecapped the group.
Faced with these setbacks, some Black politicians have tried to take matters in their own hands.
”I’ve always liked patronage,” the late Ald. William Beavers was quoted saying in the Tribune in 1988. “Why change the game when Harold Washington became mayor? You should be allowed to hire whomever you want.”
Or as former Cook County Board President Todd Stroger once argued, “Patronage has been as American as apple pie.”
Ameshia Cross, a Democratic strategist who grew up in South Shore, said comparing the racial politics of then versus now is imprecise, however. While earlier generations of European immigrants have since assimilated with white Americans, Black people remain in “an entirely separate bucket,” she said.
Cross said the city has yet to fully rectify its sordid legacy of redlining, discriminatory banks and other practices that segregated the South and West sides. That’s why the modern apparatus of government jobs serving as a “backbone” for the Black community is so critical for Johnson to protect, she said.
“Even though Chicago has never been a part of Jim Crow, Chicago very much had a separate but equal stance,” Cross said. “There is a movement, and has been for at least the better half of the past three and a half decades, to ensure that many of those gaps reach a level of closure. … That’s one of the things that this White House is trying its darnedest to erase.”
‘Fair share’
One of Washington’s signature lines that encapsulated the promise behind his Rainbow Coalition was, “You’re going to get your fair share,” as former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez recalled hearing the late mayor promise constituents.
In the decades since, Chicago’s racial interests have scarcely agreed on what a “fair share” looks like. Gutiérrez, who joined Washington’s ranks as an upstart Puerto Rican alderman, has since gravitated toward more establishment positions. He said the current political climate doesn’t need more inflammatory rhetoric like Johnson’s.
“Why would a mayor that represents everybody tout exclusively about the Black people that he’s hired?” Gutiérrez said. “The city of Chicago has come a long way, a long way, and I don’t think it needs a mayor that fans the flames of race as an issue.”
Since Johnson took office two years ago, he’s faced pushback from Latino leaders who want his staff and cabinet makeup to be more reflective of Chicago’s shifting demographics. For his part the mayor says he has the “most diverse administration” in the city’s history, which is true when measuring his share of nonwhite employees against his last three predecessors, at the very least.
But the “most diverse” label becomes more fraught when breaking down the nonwhite representation.
Over the past decade, Latinos have surpassed the shrinking Black population for the first time, leaving Chicago at about 30% Latino, 29% Black, 31% white and 7% Asian. The map that ultimately passed the City Council in the most recent ward remap following the 2020 census had 16 majority-Black wards and 14 majority-Latino wards — one fewer than what the Latino Caucus wanted — while forming the city’s first majority-Asian ward.
The makeup of the entire mayor’s office staff is 34% Black, 24% Hispanic, 30% white and 7% Asian, according to the latest numbers provided last week. Johnson’s cabinet was much Blacker, however, hovering at about 44% as of last year, according to the Triibe news website.
The mayor’s press office did not provide updated figures to the Tribune.
When asked last week whether the strong Black focus among his staff leaves Latinos, Asians and other marginalized groups behind, the mayor retorted that’s “the type of divisiveness that this president wants us to have.” He then listed seven Latinas across his leadership and cabinet team.
Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, a frequent Johnson critic, said he will continue pushing for the mayor’s Latino representation to be closer to 30%, arguing that Latinos will likely surpass white Chicagoans in next decade and become the largest group.
“There are going to be some communities that get ahead, but it should not be because of the fact that you’re saying, ‘Oh, because it’s my community, I want to get them ahead,’” Villegas said. “This is not the 1970s and ‘80s, and if we want to revert back to that, it’s the wrong approach.”
Villegas was chair of the Latino Caucus during the most recent ward redistricting process under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot, leading the failed effort to secure an additional majority-Latino seat. Then under Johnson, Villegas unsuccessfully threw his hat in the ring to be appointed Zoning chair after the coveted leadership role was vacated by Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th.
Johnson found himself in a monthslong quagmire last year because he had promised the seat to the Latino Caucus but was unable to pick a candidate he could both trust and muscle through the council, so he opted to go with Burnett and boost the Black Caucus’ chairmanships instead.
While remaining steadfast in defending the prioritization of the Black neighborhoods he says have “borne the brunt” of policies such as the 2013 mass school closings, the mayor has also sought to challenge what he sees as a cherry-picked narrative over how he approaches race.
“It sounds like to me that people tune in to what they wanted to, because the fact of the matter is that I’ve shown up for this entire city,” Johnson said last week. “The city of Chicago has suffered from a great deal of pain because of the political and the racial dividing lines that have existed in this city for a long time. I’m going to break those.”
For Ald. Nicole Lee, who represents the new Asian-majority 11th Ward, the drop in Asian representation at the senior levels was “striking.” Lightfoot had four Asian Americans in her leadership team, while Johnson has had no Asian representation among his appointees to his office for the vast majority of his term.
“I would question how we define the most diverse,” Lee said. “It is disappointing that his administration doesn’t feel representative of my own community, and it’s not something that’s lost on the community, either. It is definitely a topic of conversation among folks.”
Lee said she’s voiced this concern to Johnson before and suggested Asian American candidates for open positions, but they were not selected.
Last month, the mayor did appoint Jung Yoon as policy chief.
Victor LaGroon, former chief diversity officer at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, said it’s not realistic for governments to match their constituents’ demographics one-to-one. When the age-old bickering over “where’s mine?” does spill over, that is more a reflection of a historic scarcity of opportunity within those populations, LaGroon, who also served in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, said.
“The communities who view themselves as waiting for their turn to be served can view themselves in a very myopic way and say, ‘Hey, we didn’t get what we needed. Where’s ours?’ It’s unfortunate,” Lagroon said. “While mayors today try to get it right, I think it’s also important to notice that many of our mayors are trying to also undo some of the harm done in the past.”
