We have some advice for Gov. JB Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson, Cardinal Blase Cupich, Rev. Michael Pfleger and others who rushed out statements following images of a burning cross in Grant Park circulating online and, naturally, then being amplified by algorithms that feed like blood-thirsty vampires on controversy.
Take a breath and let the police investigate for a day or two before you trot out a statement destined to land in international media and feed someone’s need for publicity. Just tell reporters: We’re going to let the police ascertain the facts first.
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Did we learn nothing as a city after the actor Jussie Smollett reported a fake hate crime that he had actually staged himself in downtown Chicago, embarrassing any number of knee-jerk politicians (few of whom later apologized), wasting police time and trashing the city’s reputation all at once? Did that not motivate our leaders to say to their eager spokespeople, “Hang on a minute and let’s find out exactly what happened here?”
Apparently not. In this case, Pritzker immediately opined that the incident “speaks to what happens when the seeds of racism and fascism grow unchecked in our country.”
Then on Monday, WMAQ-Ch. 5 interviewed a 21-year-old college student from Naperville who told the station that he had placed a MAGA hat on top of the burning cross and that he actually was protesting the policies of President Donald Trump and didn’t expect his actions to be viewed in the context in which they were reported. The police now also have a suspect in custody. In other words, the man who talked to NBC 5 said his motivation was the precise opposite of what the governor said this incident represented.
We’ve no idea if that motivation was an after-the-fact invention of the suspect, or his lawyer, or even with certainty that it was the same person (no charges had been filed at press time), but we also know that anytime you see the words “after the image circulated online” in a shocking news story — and there were many such stories about this incident in national and local media, replete with the recounting of historical American inhumanity to man — it is a cue to be suspicious that not everything is as it first might seem.
Also a cue: anything purportedly happening in Chicago involving nooses, burning crosses and the other hateful detritus of America’s shameful past, especially from the South.
We are well aware, of course, that racially motivated incidents of hate happen in our city, but place and time still matters. Today’s Chicago racists are subtler than hauling crosses into Grant Park, and we’ve thankfully seen little if any evidence this century of any substantial city presence of the kinds of people who traffic in nooses or burning crosses.
Call us cynics, but we would not be surprised if the creation or distribution of some kind of online content had a role to play here.
Our main point is that the instant amplification of these acts, often with inaccurate context, implies that vestiges of the Klan are roaming Chicago streets. That’s triggering for our young people of color, especially, and just not true. It also contributes to the growing sense that hate crimes in blue cities are mostly manufactured for political purposes or to get clicks online.
We are not of that last view. Such crimes are real and they happen here. Just usually not at all like this.
In this case, the less our young people had heard about this misguided young man from Naperville, the better. “We can only speak to the impact. And the impact was devastating,” Johnson said Tuesday, not acknowledging that all the above incautious statements and attached media publicity are the very things that broadened the very impact he was lamenting.
The same thing happened with Smollett, of course, because people jumped too quickly to the wrong conclusion and fed the very beast Smollett had himself unleashed for his own ends. We still are mad about that. We’ve yet to hear him properly take responsibility for what he did.
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