Advocates for Latino Chicagoans told WTTW News that they believe Lightfoot failed to fulfill promises to ensure those she chose to lead city departments and to serve on city panels represented the city’s racial and ethnic diversity.
Racism
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago has revoked an honorary doctorate awarded to Kanye West, as the fallout from the rapper’s offensive remarks about Black and Jewish people continues.
Current and former employees at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet say the mega-retailer has allowed a racially hostile work environment, including death threats against Black employees and workers who are allowed to wear Confederate flag clothing, according to a complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Illinois Department of Human Rights.
From cash payouts to issuing extensive reports and building a bureaucratic system to examine what reparations could look like, here is what some local and state governments have done so far.
Those arrested came from at least 11 states, including Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming, Virginia, and Arkansas, police said. Only one was from Idaho.
Chicago’s effort to address reparations for the descendants of enslaved people stalled as suburban Evanston became the first city in the nation to offer reparations.
The new riot-related indictments against Proud Boys members are among the most serious filed so far, but they aren't the first of their kind. Eleven members or associates of the anti-government Oath Keepers militia group were indicted in January on seditious conspiracy charges in the Capitol attack.
According to the FBI’s latest annual report, there were 8,263 hate crime incidents in the U.S. in 2020. That’s up from 7,314 in 2019 when the country experienced the highest number of hate crimes since 2008. Now the Illinois Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes is set to examine how to prevent and address hate crimes across the state.
Ideas from the “great replacement theory” filled a racist screed supposedly posted online by the white 18-year-old accused of targeting Black people in Saturday’s rampage. Authorities were still working to confirm its authenticity.
Hate crimes have been on the rise in the U.S. Last fall, the FBI reported that hate crimes surged to their highest level in 12 years. The Anti-Defamation League says 2021 saw the highest number of antisemitic incidents ever recorded by the organization.
From 2019 to 2020, life expectancy in Chicago dropped almost two years – one of the sharpest single-year decreases on record, according to city officials. Latino and Black Chicagoans experienced the steepest declines, with life expectancy for the latter falling below 70 years for the first time in decades.
Helping young people figure out how to take a stand against racism is the topic of the latest selection in our Black Voices Book Club Series. “How to Fight Racism: A Guide to Standing Up for Racial Justice” aims to give young people information and tools to fight racism and effect change.
The wrongdoing was detailed in the first — and likely only — quarterly report issued by interim Inspector General William Marbeck, who is set to be replaced with a permanent watchdog later this month.
More than a third of America’s 101 historically Black colleges and universities have been targeted by calls or emails threatening to set off bombs on their campuses since early January, with the vast majority arriving during the celebration of Black History Month in February. The threats are being investigated as hate crimes.
The National Institutes of Health released the data on Thursday to help researchers start unraveling how people’s genes, environments and lifestyles interact to drive their health. And half the study’s participants are from racial and ethnic groups historically left out of medical research.
The City Council’s Subcommittee on Reparations has met only once since it was formed in June 2020, and Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward), the chair of the subcommittee, told WTTW News that her efforts to schedule additional meetings have been unsuccessful.
