(Image: Lauren Walker / Truthout)
“How dare a nation that has bomb shrapnel or tank tracks in almost every country on the planet, claiming to fight for justice and democracy ask ME if I plan on being peaceful in the face of police executions that go unpunished. If I could simply airstrike away my oppression, best believe I’d be in flight school tomorrow. But my task is to build a movement that will one day disarm the armed murderers who kill for profit, land and power.” – Brian Taylor, Black Lives Matter of Cincinnati
On Donald Trump’s fifth day as president of the United States, he tweeted out that he “will send in the Feds” if Chicago doesn’t fix the “horrible ‘carnage'” going on. He then cited statistics stating that there have been 228 shootings with 42 killings that have occurred so far in 2017, up from 2016’s comparative total. What Trump did not do was include within that context the fact that Illinois has the highest Black unemployment rate in the nation and that 50 percent of young Black men in Chicago are unemployed or out of school. He also neglected to include the fact that Chicago is home to the largest mass public school closing in US history, thanks to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who chose to close schools in predominantly impoverished Black areas of the city. Trump also failed to mention that Emanuel also closed half of the city’s mental health care centers in 2012. All of these closures were met with fierce organizing by the community: the elderly and patients put their bodies on the line to prevent the closing of a South Side community’s only mental health care center, and parents and community members went on a hunger strike to save a South Side neighborhood’s only high school.
In addition, Trump failed to mention that while income has increased by 44 percent for white Chicagoans, it has actually decreased by 4 percent for Black Chicagoans. He continued to neglect to state that many entities, including the World Health Organization, cite increases in income…