The legacy of Jesse Jackson makes all of us less safe
If you ride the trains or buses in this town with any regularity, you don’t worry about microaggressions.
You worry about being maced, mugged, shoved onto the tracks — or, in one grotesque recent case, set on fire.
That’s the lived experience of Chicagoans navigating the Chicago Transit Authority and Metra. Not academic theory. Not seminar-room sociology. Reality.
So naturally, when a modest pilot program is introduced allowing the transit agencies to suspend individuals who assault conductors, spit on drivers, punch random riders, or otherwise turn public transportation into a Thunderdome audition, what does the Chicago Tribune decide is the story?
Not whether the program works.
Not whether it can be enforced.
Not whether it deters crime.
No.
The story, apparently, is that it’s racist.
Because roughly 90 percent of the approximately 40 individuals suspended under the program are Black or Hispanic.
Forty people. In a city of nearly three million. On a transit system carrying hundreds of thousands daily.
That’s the scandal.
The exercise in futility nobody wants to discuss
Let’s start with the obvious: The program is likely an exercise in futility.
How exactly do you enforce a transit ban in 2026 Chicago?
There are no ticket agents.
There are no conductors policing turnstiles.
Bus drivers sit behind plastic shields — cages, really — installed because too many of them were being attacked.
You think a driver is going to step out from behind that barrier and say, “Excuse me, sir, our records indicate you’re under suspension”?
There’s no one at the station entrances checking IDs. There’s no practical mechanism to stop someone from tapping a Ventra card or just hopping a turnstile.
And if you suggest facial recognition technology?
Prepare for the five-alarm firestorm about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties. The same activists who say the suspension program is racist would melt down over any serious enforcement mechanism.
So yes — from a practical standpoint, the whole thing may be symbolic.
But here’s the key point: at least it’s an attempt to impose consequences.
And in modern Chicago, consequences are controversial.
Identity politics over public safety
Instead of asking whether violent or abusive behavior on transit should carry penalties, the Tribune frames the issue through the lens of “disparate impact.”
There they are again — the two most dangerous words in the English language.
Disparate impact.
The idea that if outcomes are uneven across racial groups, the policy itself must be suspect — regardless of intent, regardless of behavior, regardless of context.
The CTA cannot control who spits in a conductor’s face.
It cannot control who punches strangers for sport.
It cannot control who brandishes a weapon on a train platform.
It responds to behavior.
If 40 people were suspended, it is because 40 people committed acts that met the suspension criteria. The racial breakdown of that group is a function of who committed the acts — not who wrote the rule.
Yet in Chicago, we are conditioned to treat every enforcement disparity as evidence of oppression.
This mentality has warped policing.
It has warped prosecution.
It has warped policy.
And it has made the city less safe.
A city that attacks its defenders
Look around.
A tactical police unit does proactive enforcement? It’s accused of bias.
Transit officers remove an aggressive passenger? It’s framed as racial profiling.
ICE agents enforce federal immigration law? They’re portrayed as villains.
Meanwhile, the criminals — the people actually harming others — are treated as a protected class.
We spend more time investigating the motives of law enforcement than the motives of the lawless.
The message is unmistakable: enforce at your peril.
And so enforcement retreats.
Woodlawn and the real victims
Just this week, five people were shot in Woodlawn.
Gang violence continues to erupt across parts of the South and West Sides. The victims are overwhelmingly people of color. The residents pleading for safety are people of color. The families fleeing to Indiana, Texas, Tennessee — many of them are people of color.
Yet the narrative machine grinds on.
The real injustice, we’re told, is that 40 individuals suspended from public transit are disproportionately Black or Hispanic.
Not the grandmother afraid to take the Green Line at night.
Not the nurse working second shift who carries pepper spray in her purse.
Not the kid dodging gang recruitment on his walk home.
The obsession with optics overrides the reality of harm.
The Jesse Jackson legacy
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but we cannot understand modern Chicago politics without acknowledging the long shadow of Jesse Jackson.
He was a gifted organizer. A charismatic voice. A man who mobilized communities and reshaped the political landscape.
But he also institutionalized a politics of grievance — a framework in which virtually every enforcement action is interpreted through racial suspicion.
Over decades, that lens hardened.
Today, even when transit employees — themselves often minorities — attempt to protect riders, the reflex is to assume racial motive.
The result?
Law enforcement paralysis.
When every policy risks being labeled racist, the safest bureaucratic move is to do nothing.
And that is precisely what too many agencies in this city have chosen to do for years.
The population tells the story
Chicago continues to struggle with population decline. Census estimates since 2020 show net losses, even if the exact numbers fluctuate year to year.
Who leaves?
Taxpayers.
Families.
Working-class strivers.
Including many Black and Hispanic Chicagoans who are tired of living in what feels like an upside-down moral order.
Where criminals roam freely.
Where police are second-guessed.
Where enforcement is suspect.
Where newspapers fan the flames instead of confronting the facts.
Public safety is not racist.
It is foundational.
Without it, everything else — schools, jobs, investment, opportunity — erodes.
A city turned upside down
We are living in a moment where common sense is treated as provocation.
Suspend someone for assaulting a transit worker?
Racist.
Crack down on repeat violent offenders?
Carceral overreach.
Cooperate with federal authorities?
Fascism.
Meanwhile, ordinary Chicagoans — Black, white, Hispanic, Asian — simply want to get to work without being harassed or harmed.
They want buses and trains that function.
They want a city where criminals fear consequences more than police fear headlines.
The transit suspension program may not work. In fact, it probably won’t, absent serious enforcement mechanisms.
But attacking it as racist misses the point entirely.
The real disparity in Chicago is not racial.
It’s moral.
Between those who obey the law and those who don’t.
Between those who ride the train to work and those who turn it into a crime scene.
Between taxpayers and predators.
Until we stop viewing every enforcement action through the distorted prism of identity politics, we will continue to decline.
And the biggest victims will be the very communities progressivism claims to protect.
