Petitions have been circulating in Chicago wards since the end of July. The names will be filed by the end of October. We will vote in February. Now the question is which candidates to choose.
That is the easy question. The harder one is what we do after the votes are counted.
Two stories get told in our communities about Black elected officials. The first is that getting one of ours into the seat is the accomplishment. The second is that the ones already in the seat have done nothing.
Both stories are comfortable. Neither one requires anything of the person telling it but an opinion.
What shared experience is worth
There is a real reason to want someone of shared experience in office.
A man who grew up on the block does not have to be convinced the block exists. He does not need a study to believe you about the response times, the store that closed, the school that was consolidated, the lot that has sat empty for eleven years. He has stood in the same lines. He has waited on the same buses. When issues reach rooms you will never be inside, he can argue it from the inside of the experience rather than from a briefing memo.
That is worth something. It is worth a great deal. Other groups in this city understand it, which is why they fight to keep their own people in position and fight harder to keep them there once they arrive.
The shared face is the starting point.
It does not always go anywhere. Too often it does not. The man who knows the block goes into the room and the block does not come out of the room with him. The experience is real and it never reaches the vote, the budget, or the ordinance. Nothing about a shared background guarantees that the background will be used on our behalf.
The seat is not the result.
So the question has to be asked. If the experience does not appear in the record, what exactly did the shared experience gain us?
I am asking because the answer depends as much on us as it does on him.
When support becomes management
Shared experience is also the fastest way to get past a person's guard. That is not an accusation. That is a fact, and everyone who works in persuasion for a living knows it.
When we believe someone has lived what we have lived, we stop examining. We extend trust we have not verified. And once we have extended it, we defend it, because withdrawing it would mean admitting we gave it away too easily.
We are told what we stand to lose far more often than we are told what we will gain. Fear moves us faster than a program does, and it costs the person using it nothing, because a warning requires no delivery date. The endorsement arrives from a platform we already trust, so we transfer that trust without asking whether the platform examined anything itself.
We say a name out loud to a neighbor, and from that moment forward we are defending our own credibility instead of measuring a record. The rally is scheduled for the week before the vote, never the week the budget is voted on. Every one of these arrives looking like support, and that is exactly why it works.
The same shared face produces both outcomes. The record is the only thing that tells us which one we are looking at.
What the work actually requires
I have spent much of my career in and around government, and I have watched measures die in implementation while the announcement of them was still being celebrated.
The person in the seat is our neighbor. He lives in the ward. His children go to school here, his mother is a few blocks over, and he shops where we shop. When he ran, he had a vision for this community and he believed he could deliver it. Nearly all of them start there.
Serving is harder than any of us admit from the outside.
No alderman accomplishes anything by himself. There are fifty of them. An ordinance requires votes he does not control, from colleagues whose wards want different things, and getting those votes takes negotiation and compromise — the very thing we have decided to treat as betrayal. Then it has to be implemented, and implementation is where most legislation quietly dies. A measure that reads well the day it passes can be unfunded, unenforceable, or years away from producing anything, and none of that is visible in the announcement.
We stopped teaching this. Civics left the curriculum and nothing replaced it. A generation has come up with no working understanding of how a law is made, who has to agree to it, what an appropriation is, or why the thing announced in March still has not appeared by December.
So we substituted a standard we could apply without studying anything. We decided that the most effective official is the one with the best and loudest soundbite.
Respectfully, that is foolishness. Volume by itself has not delivered measurable results for us. Disruption with no strategy behind it produces attention and nothing else, and attention is not an outcome. We have watched people build entire careers on being the angriest voice in the room while our condition stayed exactly where it was.
And we have made peace with accepting the least. We measure our community's success against the least unfavorable outcome available to us and call that a win.
What standard is that? Do we require any qualification for leadership at all — any competence, any preparation, any evidence that the person can do the work? Do we ask? Do we care? If we do not ask, on what grounds do we claim to care about the outcome?
We give opinions without investing the discipline to understand the process. How legislation is presented to us and what it takes to implement it are two entirely different things. We study the presentation. We rarely have the discipline to study the implementation, or to ask whether it will produce what was promised.
Servant leadership is not easy. It takes strategy, study, a team, and a community committed to the same outcome. Anything less than that fails. That is a description of what we were supposed to be supplying.
Who donated the school supplies
Every August there are school supplies. In November there are turkeys. In December there are toys. Residents expect these things, and residents are right to expect them, because they have become the visible proof that someone in office remembers the ward exists.
Who donated them?
Not the alderman. The donations came from a corporation, a utility, a developer, a hospital system, a contractor. Some of those businesses sit inside the ward and some do not. Some have business before the city and some do not. What none of them are is us. And whoever supplies what we will not supply ourselves has a claim on the office that we have never made.
We did not fund the seat. Somebody else did. Then we spend four years wondering why the seat answers to somebody else.
This is not a character problem. It is an arithmetic problem — a question of who put money in and who did not. Money is the one form of support that gets counted, disclosed, and filed. Everything else we offer — the complaint at the meeting, the post, the conversation on the porch — leaves no record and applies little weight. Our people have almost never given money to the people we elect. We have given noise, and we have given it after the fact.
Consider what the smallest possible contribution would produce.
Five dollars a year, from five thousand households in one ward, is twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Over a four-year term, one hundred thousand dollars.
For scale: the average winning Chicago City Council campaign in 2023 spent about a quarter of a million dollars, according to an analysis by Reform for Illinois. One hundred thousand dollars raised inside the ward would be a serious share of that — and it would arrive owing nobody anything.
Five dollars a year is forty-two cents a month. Most households in this city can find forty-two cents a month if they decide the outcome is worth it. And most of us can name three things we waste more than that on before noon.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad did this arithmetic sixty years ago, for the whole nation, in Chapter 34 of Message to the Blackman in America:
One dollar. He was not asking for sacrifice. He was pointing out that we had confused a small amount of money with a small amount of power.
And this is not only about a campaign. Five thousand households at five dollars produces the same one hundred thousand dollars for a community organization, a school program, a block club, a building fund — and that money does not have to wait for an election to do anything. Which raises a question we have been avoiding for a long time. How much of what we have been demanding from the political process were we always able to do ourselves?
He gave the instruction on that too, in the economic blueprint He laid out in Chapter 80:
Pool your resources. Stop the wanton criticism. Both instructions, in the same list, because He understood they were the same problem.
He left us the blueprint
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad addressed this exact subject directly. Not the principle of it — the subject of it, Black politicians and the people who elect them. In Chapter 79 of Message to the Blackman in America, He wrote:
He then named what is required of the officeholder:
And He named what is required of us:
Total backing. Not a vote every four years. Not applause. Backing.
What the Messenger described is clear. The official is obligated to serve without fear. The population is obligated to back him so completely that fear costs him nothing. Neither obligation works alone. A fearless official with no base behind him is isolated and eventually removed. A backed official who fears the room is useless to us no matter how much we give him.
He set out the conduct of that relationship in The Proper Way of Handling People, written for laborers in the Mosque and applicable anywhere people are led. The agreement He laid down in Section XVII runs in both directions:
On correction, in Section XI, He was specific:
We do the opposite of both. We correct in public, at volume, for an audience, and we rarely stop to ask whether the correction was necessary or whether we simply wanted to be seen delivering it. Then we are surprised when the next person who takes the seat treats his own community as the most dangerous room he has to walk into.
We seek to embarrass and destroy our own.
He also distinguished between leadership built on obedience and leadership built on cooperation — dependence and orders on one side, individual responsibility and consultation on the other. We have accepted the first arrangement and complained about the results of it.
The blueprint is not missing. We are not using it.
We are not owed good representation because we showed up once. Nobody gets that. The official carries his half of this and it is heavy — he answers for the record, the vote, and whether the experience he shares with us ever reaches the ordinance. But we carry the other half. He put the instruction in print sixty years ago, and for the most part we have not acted on it. We withheld the money. We withheld the study that would have let us judge the work honestly. We withheld the correction that could have been useful, and delivered the condemnation that never was. And where we set no standard, we accepted whatever arrived.
Regardless of our political persuasion, our religious denomination, or our economic status, we are all Black people in the same condition. The condition is not going to be voted away in February. It was never going to be.
We cannot change our condition unless we change our way of thinking, so teaches the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. That is the whole of it. Thought is what changes a people, and everything else follows from what we have decided is possible.
So before the ballot arrives, the question is not who you are going to vote for.
What does your support actually look like — and if you cannot name it, what is it you believe you are owed?