Police budgets are another dimension of violence perpetrated against Black communities. When you starve the South and West Sides of basic services but pump up a budget for a department that produces less and less every year, it is as if you would prefer money to be wasted than used to help Black people 🧐
Even in years when CPD can't find people to work as cops and they make it a whole news story, they STILL get more money. Arrests go down every year, but you know what goes up? The budget 4 administration. So you're hiring more people to oversee fewer

If Boston was going to commission a sculpture related to the integration movement and Dr. King, I wonder why they didn't take more inspiration from Boston history?

Since we are celebrating a new sculpture in Boston which some suggest means the city left its racist past behind in the '70s, let me tell you about when the whites of Boston came together to thwart the will of Roxbury in the '80s. #thread As a young undergraduate going to my Nonno's alma mater, Suffolk University, I quickly identified the most deeply and broadly knowledgeable professor in the political science department: Mudavanha Patterson. We hit it off, and he let me hang out after classes, and we talked about

For people who have not followed my public life, I want to address an extremely important issue related to my campaign: I am a white man running for office on the South Lakefront. This ward is somewhere between 50% and 60% Black. Why?

Four years ago, it became clear we needed a new alderman. (I will talk about why often in the next few months.) I made a list of five Black residents of the ward who I considered quality people. I called each one of them and tried to persuade them to run for office. They all refused. Three suggested I run

Chicago cannot provide #Reparations. That is a proper noun. It refers to a federal obligation.

Chicago absolutely can and must provide reparative justice. Ald. Stephanie Coleman is leading an effort to hold corporations accountable for their role historically in the slave trade through her subcommittee in the Health & Human Relations Committee. I believe we need to provide robust funding for that subcommittee and to elevate Ald. Coleman to the chairwomanship of that committee. We need to talk about our economic obligation to the descendants of enslaved

We will not move forward as a nation until we address the centuries-old slaver culture that dominates every aspect of our society. We will not progress until we redress, & that requires understanding. It's a battle on all fronts: emotional, spiritual, economic, social, political, and on & on. But the good news is that the fulcrum is fundamentally an economic praxis. Fix the way our money behaves, and the old worldview shatters. We have been avoiding this reckoning since 1865 and before, but we are now out of time. Our planet is burning because we cannot

Hey everyone -
Today I am officially launching my campaign for Fifth Ward alderman. There are a host of local issues that I will address over the next few days. I want to begin by talking about #Reparations.

Cities cannot provide Reparations as we use that word. It is a federal debt requiring the vast powers of the federal government to repay. States and municipalities can be incredibly important allies in laying the groundwork for a federal Reparations claim, however, & we can absolutely provide reparative justice for the descendents of enslaved Black