TIC Advocates

10/01/2026

09/27/2026

Strides for Peace what an outstanding time. Y'all are obviously outstanding at what y'all do. I feel like with all these violence prevention organizations with funding we could've filled the building. I can see that we sometimes drop the ball by not making sure our youth are at these events. Y'all that don't do the work outside of reporting purposes need to see these kind of events being done and make sure they are at capacity.

09/24/2026

Our website is currently down.

09/22/2026

Keep it all!! Document everything!!

~Carla 💜💜

09/22/2026

The Black Chicago 10

Before anybody gets caught up in the title, let me be clear about what I'm doing. I'm talking specifically about Black Chicago because that is the community I'm examining. I am not suggesting that every Black person in Chicago thinks alike, votes alike, has the same income, lives in the same kind of neighborhood, or even agrees about what our political priorities should be. We don't. I'm also not suggesting that other communities don't have legitimate concerns of their own.

What I am saying is that politicians routinely come into Black communities asking for our votes, and I think we have every right to be much more specific about what we expect in return for giving someone governmental power.

At this point, we do not need another study to tell us that disparities exist. Government has already studied our schools, our health, our housing, our neighborhoods, policing, violence, employment and economic opportunity. There are reports, commissions, strategic plans, community meetings, task forces and datasets documenting problems that Black people have been talking about for generations. So I don't want the next conversation to begin with another politician asking us, "What do you need?"

In a lot of these areas, you already know.

What I want to know is what you're prepared to do about it, what power the office you're seeking actually gives you to do it, and what you're willing to be held accountable for when your term is over.

1. Let's start with power and who actually gets to make decisions.

We use the term "community engagement" constantly, but community engagement and community power are not the same thing. You can survey people, invite them to a meeting, create an advisory council, ask for public comments and still make the final decision exactly the way you intended to make it before anybody walked into the room.

I want politicians to be more specific about where the community actually has authority. Which decisions affecting a neighborhood legitimately have to remain with city, county or state government, and which decisions can be made closer to the people who have to live with the consequences? When residents make recommendations and government rejects them, there should also be a record of what residents asked for, what government decided instead and why.

I'm not asking for government to disappear. There are responsibilities that belong to government. I'm asking how much of our everyday lives actually need to be controlled by institutions that are removed from the people most affected by their decisions.

2. When you say money was invested in our communities, show us what that actually means.

If somebody tells me that $50 million or $100 million was invested in Black communities, the size of the number by itself doesn't impress me anymore. I want to know how much was appropriated, how much was actually spent, who received the contracts, who received the subcontracts, how much went toward administration, how much reached direct services and what was accomplished with it.

I also want to know who became economically stronger because that money moved. Did residents get permanent jobs? Did local businesses become prime contractors, or were they brought in for a small subcontract? Did anybody acquire property or build equity? Did a neighborhood organization become strong enough to continue its work after the grant ended? Did the people living in the community gain anything that they still owned after the money was gone?

That's the distinction I want us to start making. Spending money in a Black neighborhood and creating economic power for Black residents are not necessarily the same thing. If you're going to use our communities when you announce the investment, then we should be able to trace the investment all the way through and see who actually benefited from it.

3. When it comes to our children, we're not waiting for something to go wrong. Something already has.

CPS itself acknowledges persistent disparities affecting Black students, so we do not need to spend another election cycle debating whether those disparities exist. What I want to know is what you're proposing to change and how we're going to know whether it changed.

And I don't want the entire conversation about Black children reduced to test scores, discipline and what happens when a child is considered "at risk." I want to know what an ordinary Black child in Chicago has access to simply because we believe that child deserves an opportunity to thrive. Can that child learn a trade? Get exposure to technology? Participate in the arts? Play sports? Get a paid internship? Receive mental-health support? Learn how to start a business? Prepare for college? Learn how local government works and how to participate in it?

I also want us to start comparing what government is willing to invest in children while they are simply children with what government is willing to spend once those same children enter crisis systems. If those numbers tell us something uncomfortable about our priorities, then we need to deal with what they tell us instead of hiding from it.

4. We have been talking about safety for years. The question now is how you're going to implement what communities have already said.

Black people should not have to choose between being safe from violence and being safe from government misconduct. Those are not competing rights.

We want to be able to sit on our porches, walk down our blocks and send our children outside without worrying about somebody being shot. When somebody is actually in danger, we want competent law enforcement to respond. We also want violence interrupted before somebody gets killed, mental-health crises handled appropriately, victims supported, young people given meaningful alternatives and police officers held accountable to the law they are empowered to enforce.

Chicago has collected years of community input on public safety. So I don't need another candidate coming into the neighborhood and asking, "What does safety look like to you?" as though this conversation started yesterday. Tell us which community-identified priorities you're prepared to implement, how you're going to fund them, how much authority residents will have over implementation and what measurements you're going to use to determine whether people are actually safer.

5. If our neighborhood is being developed, then we need a serious conversation about how much of the benefit stays in our neighborhood.

For decades, some Black neighborhoods were places people talked about as though nobody wanted to live there and nothing was worth investing in. Then development comes, property becomes valuable, new businesses arrive and suddenly the people who held that neighborhood together through the years of disinvestment are struggling to afford the place they helped sustain.

If public money, public land, tax incentives, zoning decisions or other government action helps make a development possible, I believe we should be discussing a measurable community-retention standard. I have talked about 60 percent as a working idea, but I'm not interested in throwing out an impressive number that can't survive legal or economic scrutiny. We need to determine what government can lawfully require, what percentage is defensible and, most importantly, what counts as a community benefit.

Temporary construction jobs alone are not enough. We should be looking at permanent employment, locally owned businesses receiving meaningful contracts, homeownership opportunities, affordable commercial space, local procurement, resident equity and assets that remain in the community long after construction crews leave.

The basic principle is not complicated: if public action helps create new economic value in a neighborhood, the people who already live there should have a meaningful opportunity to participate in that value instead of watching it happen around them.

6. We also need to look at who gets paid to solve problems in our communities and what they're actually leaving behind.

This is not about saying somebody cannot work in a Black neighborhood because they aren't Black or because they weren't born there. That would oversimplify the issue. The question is whether millions of dollars can continuously move through programs designed to address problems concentrated in Black communities without building comparable professional and institutional capacity among people who actually live in those communities.

If public money is funding an organization to address violence, health, housing, youth development or another community issue, then show us more than the grant amount. Where legally available, show us executive compensation. Show us workforce composition. Show us neighborhood hiring. Show us how much went to administration and how much went directly toward the work. Show us the outcomes the organization was funded to produce.

Then tell us what remains when that particular grant ends. Are there residents with careers they didn't have before? Is there stronger local leadership? Is there an organization with increased capacity? Did the community gain infrastructure, knowledge or assets that remain there?

Spending a grant proves that money was spent. It does not, by itself, prove that people's lives improved.

7. Affordable housing cannot be the end of our housing conversation. We need to talk about ownership.

I absolutely care whether people can afford rent. But I also want to know how many Black families are becoming homeowners, how many longtime homeowners are able to keep their homes, how much land residents own, how many neighborhood businesses own their buildings and who gains the equity when property values increase.

If government is putting public resources into neighborhoods and those investments help property values rise, we need to be asking who participates in the wealth created by that increase. Otherwise, we can spend billions "improving" neighborhoods while the people who survived their years of disinvestment end up renting from somebody who arrived after the investment did.

So give us the ownership numbers alongside the affordable-housing numbers. Tell us how many people became owners, how many existing owners remained owners and how much community-controlled property existed when you entered office compared with when you left.

8. Accountability has to mean that something actually happens when government fails people.

And I'm not only talking about police.

If a police officer unlawfully harms somebody, there needs to be a credible process and a consequence when misconduct is substantiated. If a housing agency approves conditions that violate applicable standards, there needs to be accountability. If an inspector knowingly signs off on something that should not have passed, there needs to be accountability. If a contractor takes public money and doesn't deliver what the contract required, there needs to be accountability.

For every major government system, an ordinary person should be able to answer four questions without needing a lawyer to figure it out: Who investigates the complaint? Who makes the final decision? What happens when wrongdoing is substantiated? What remedy is available to the person who was harmed?

I also think we need a serious policy conversation about what individual accountability should look like when public misconduct causes death or catastrophic harm. I've raised the idea of whether pensions or other individual financial interests should ever be implicated rather than taxpayers carrying the entire financial consequence through settlements. Current Illinois law does not simply transfer an officer's pension to a victim's family, and any proposal in that direction would have to survive pension protections, due process, collective bargaining and other legal requirements. That's exactly why I want the conversation grounded in law instead of slogans.

The larger point is that "the city paid a settlement" cannot automatically be treated as the same thing as individual or institutional accountability.

9. When government already knows a racial health disparity exists, stop telling us you are "committed" to fixing it. Tell us what number you're trying to change.

Illinois' own data show serious racial disparities in maternal mortality. That means a politician does not need to convince me that Black maternal health matters. Tell me what measurable outcome you're proposing to improve, what the current baseline is, where you intend for that number to be in three or four years and what you will change if your strategy isn't working.

I want the same approach applied to mental health, chronic disease, trauma, environmental health, substance-use treatment and access to care wherever the evidence establishes a meaningful disparity.

Programs are tools. They are not outcomes. Opening a program, awarding a grant or holding a press conference tells us what government did. Whether people became healthier tells us whether it worked.

10. Finally, transparency cannot only mean showing us where the money went. We need a record of the government itself.

I want to be able to see what you promised, what legislation you introduced, how you voted, what you funded, what you cut, who you appointed, who received contracts, what communities received investment and what results followed.

When residents make recommendations, preserve those recommendations. When government rejects them, document why. When a program works, show us the evidence. When it doesn't work, say that too. I don't expect any administration, legislator or elected official to get everything right. I do expect government to be honest enough to distinguish between what was promised, what was attempted, what was actually delivered and what failed.

And the public shouldn't have to search six databases, file three FOIA requests and know somebody who works at City Hall to put that story together.

So when the next election comes around, don't come back into our neighborhoods with a commercial telling us what you accomplished. Leave enough of a public record that we can look at it ourselves and tell you what you accomplished.

That's what accountability looks like to me. And that's the conversation I want to have with anybody asking Black Chicago for the privilege of our vote.This is the version whose prose structure I would build from. I deliberately kept the longer paragraphs where a thought needs room, stopped isolating words for artificial emphasis, and let the argument carry the emphasis instead.
TRACY CHANAE REED.

09/19/2026

1 I always believe in going back to your roots the initial way I gave back to my community was through food I have never been able to separate service and food so I am developing a new program.

09/15/2026

Human trafficking series registration
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09/13/2026

Who Gets to Define Black Political Self-Interest?

There is a question I have been wrestling with about Black people and politics in Chicago, and the more I sit with it, the less comfortable I am with the way the question is usually asked.

We hear some version of it all the time: Why do Black people vote against their own interests?

Sometimes the accusation comes from conservatives. Sometimes it comes from progressives. And sometimes it comes from other Black people looking at an election result and wondering how in the hell we got there. I have thought it myself.

But there is a problem buried inside the question. Who gets to decide what Black people's political interests are?

Because Black people are not a monolith. We are a population.

We do not have one income, one profession, one neighborhood, one family structure, one relationship with government, one experience with policing, one opinion about public education, or even one definition of what it means to be safe.

So before we accuse Black voters of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, maybe we need to ask a harder question: Whose face are we talking about?

Black People Are Not a Voting Bloc. We Are a Population.

Political language has a way of flattening us. "The Black vote." "The Black community." "Black issues."

Those phrases can be useful when we are talking about collective disparities, discrimination or political power. But they become dangerous when they convince us that Blackness comes with a predetermined political position. It doesn't.

A Black homeowner worried about property taxes can have a different political priority from a young Black renter wondering whether homeownership will ever be within reach. A Black police officer and a Black violence-prevention worker may have different ideas about public safety while both desperately wanting fewer Black children buried.

A CPS teacher, small-business owner, grandmother raising grandchildren, returning citizen, college student, union worker and unemployed 22-year-old may all love Black Chicago and still disagree about what government should do first.

That does not make one of them less Black. It makes Black political life complicated.

Perhaps one of our first mistakes is confusing shared history with identical political interests. We share history. We do not share one life.

And that history matters enormously in Chicago.

Chicago Has Been Here Before

Black Chicago's relationship with political power did not begin with Brandon Johnson.

For generations, Black voters existed inside a Chicago political system that needed their votes while frequently denying Black communities equal access to power, housing, services and opportunity. Under the old Democratic machine, Black political support could be welcomed while Black political independence was something else entirely.

By the 1970s, that relationship was breaking down. Black support for the Daley machine had deteriorated, and after Richard J. Daley's death, a different kind of political possibility emerged.

Then came Harold Washington.

His 1983 campaign did not simply produce Chicago's first Black mayor. It activated political participation. More than 100,000 Chicagoans registered around that election period, many of them Black. Black Chicago was not merely voting for representation. People were mobilizing around the possibility that political power itself could be exercised differently.

Washington's election also exposed something else. Representation did not erase the structure surrounding him.

He faced extraordinary resistance from a predominantly white City Council during what became known as the Council Wars. His administration was forced to govern inside institutions that had not suddenly transformed simply because a Black man occupied the mayor's office.

That history matters now because it complicates the way we talk about Black leadership. Electing somebody is one exercise of power. What that person can do with the institutions they inherit is another. And what they actually do with that power is another question altogether.

Representation Is Not the Same as Results

Forty years after Harold Washington, Chicago elected another Black mayor under very different circumstances.

Brandon Johnson's 2023 victory tells us something remarkable about Black political participation—and Black political disengagement—at the same time.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago analyzed all 1,291 voting precincts and estimated that Johnson received 88 percent of the Black vote in the runoff. But their analysis produced another number that deserves just as much attention: only an estimated 29 percent of registered Black voters voted. White registered voters, by comparison, had an estimated turnout of 61.1 percent.

Sit with that for a minute. Among Black Chicagoans who participated, Johnson received overwhelming support. But most registered Black Chicagoans did not participate at all.

So before we spend all of our time arguing about how Black people vote, perhaps we should spend some time asking why so many don't.

We often call that apathy. I'm not convinced that's always the right word.

There is a difference between: I don't care what happens and I don't believe any of these people are going to change what happens to me.

One is apathy. The other may be political disillusionment.

And when a population repeatedly encounters government as something that promises, studies, announces and campaigns more effectively than it delivers, disengagement can become learned behavior.

That doesn't make disengagement harmless. But it does make it understandable.

So Let's Talk About Brandon Johnson

I am not interested in defending Brandon Johnson because he is Black. Black leadership does not deserve immunity from Black criticism. Actually, I would argue the opposite.

If you campaign in communities that have historically been failed by institutions, ask those communities to trust you, speak explicitly about structural inequity and then acquire political power, people have every right to ask what you did with it.

Johnson entered office with a governing philosophy centered heavily on investment: public education, youth opportunity, mental health, housing, violence prevention and addressing some of the conditions that exist underneath crime rather than relying exclusively on policing.

For communities that have spent decades asking government to address root causes, those ideas should matter. But an idea being aligned with Black interests does not automatically mean Black people are benefiting from it.

And that brings me to the question at the center of this entire conversation: What is the political value of an administration pursuing policies that theoretically benefit Black communities if the people those policies are supposed to benefit cannot see, access, understand or feel them?

That is not merely a communications problem. That is a governance problem.

A task force is not a repaired neighborhood. A press conference is not employment. A violence-prevention appropriation is not a mother feeling safe when her child walks to the store. A housing initiative is not somebody finally being able to afford a home. A mental-health investment means very little to the person who still cannot get an appointment. And a budget line is not an outcome.

That doesn't mean the policy is worthless. It means government has more than one job. Government must develop policy. Government must implement policy. And ultimately, government must produce impact.

You Cannot Communicate People Out of Their Lived Experience

This is where politicians often lose people.

Government speaks in millions. Residents speak in experiences.

Government says it allocated $20 million. A resident says, Okay. Where is it? Government says violence is trending downward. A mother says, Somebody got shot two blocks from me last week. Government says it invested in economic development. A resident looks down the commercial corridor and sees the same vacant storefronts.

Both things can be true. That is what makes governing difficult.

Data matters. Context matters. Long-term investment matters. Structural problems created over generations will not disappear during one mayoral term. But people do not live inside policy briefs. They live on blocks.

They live in apartments. They stand at bus stops. They send children to neighborhood schools. They look at grocery prices. They pay property taxes. They call 911. They search for therapists. They try to find their sons jobs. They hear gunshots. They watch buildings remain vacant.

And eventually, that is where government is judged.

You can correct misinformation. You can explain jurisdiction. You can explain that the mayor does not personally control every institution operating in Chicago. You can show progress that has not received enough attention. All of that is legitimate.

But you cannot communicate somebody out of their lived experience. If government wants people to believe something different, eventually government has to give them something different to experience.

Distrust Can Be Political Memory

I think we underestimate this part. Black distrust of institutions did not fall out of the sky. Sometimes what political professionals call cynicism is memory.

People remember politicians showing up during election season. They remember development being promised. They remember schools closing. They remember programs announced with cameras and quietly disappearing when funding ended. They remember organizations receiving money while their block remained the same.

They remember being studied. Surveyed. Assessed. "Engaged." They remember giving government their stories and never hearing what happened afterward.

Then the next administration arrives and asks them to believe again. That is a hell of an emotional burden to place on a ballot.

And this is where political behavior becomes more complicated than Democrat versus Republican or progressive versus conservative.

Some people vote from hope. Some vote from fear. Some vote from loyalty. Some vote from anger. Some vote because their parents taught them that people died for that right. Some vote against somebody rather than for somebody. And some don't vote because they have concluded that none of it reaches their front door.

Those are political decisions, but they are emotional decisions too. We should be intellectually honest enough to examine both.

Accountability Is Not Betrayal

Black people fought too hard for political representation to reduce representation to symbolism once we achieved it. Having a Black mayor cannot mean that criticism of the mayor becomes criticism of Blackness.

Brandon Johnson should be judged. Judge public safety. Judge schools. Judge economic development. Judge housing. Judge taxes. Judge fiscal management. Judge city services. Judge whether investments reached the communities they were intended to reach. Judge outcomes.

But judgment should be informed.

There is a difference between saying a policy failed and never knowing the policy existed. There is a difference between disagreeing with a mayoral decision and blaming the mayor for something outside mayoral authority. There is a difference between legitimate disappointment and political messaging designed to exploit disappointment.

If we demand accountability, then we also have an obligation to know what the hell we are holding somebody accountable for.

That isn't loyalty to Brandon Johnson. That's political literacy.

Policy Benefit Versus Perceived Benefit

This distinction may be one of the most important ones in Chicago politics.

A government can produce a policy benefit without producing a perceived benefit. It can also produce the perception of progress without producing meaningful structural change.

Politicians have mastered that second one.

Ribbon cuttings photograph well. Big checks photograph well. Press conferences photograph well. A beautifully named initiative photographs well.

Structural change usually doesn't.

Structural change is slow and bureaucratic. It involves budgets, contracts, staffing, implementation, evaluation and usually more time than an election cycle allows.

But elected officials do not get to use complexity as an excuse. Implementation is part of policy.

If the people who need a program cannot find it, there is a problem. If they cannot access it, there is a problem. If community organizations doing legitimate work cannot navigate the bureaucracy required to receive resources, there is a problem. If millions are allocated but residents cannot identify a meaningful difference, government should want to know why.

And if something genuinely is working but the people who could benefit from it don't know it exists? That's a problem too.

Government cannot simply announce that it has done the work. It has to close the distance between the institution and the people.

Maybe We Are Asking the Wrong Communication Question

That brings me back to something I originally wanted to understand: How do we communicate to Black Chicago the benefits of having a mayor like Brandon Johnson, if those benefits exist?

The more I think about it, the more I believe the question itself needs to change.

Maybe you don't communicate people into believing their government benefits them. Maybe government demonstrates it.

The communication is the outcome.

The reopened service. The job. The summer program that actually had room for your child. The neighborhood organization that finally received enough money to do the work properly. The mental-health appointment you could actually get. The block where violence declined and stayed down. The city contract that finally reached a small business that had historically been locked out.

The young person who can point to an opportunity and say: I got this because somebody built something for us.

That communicates.

Then tell people who created it. Tell them what changed. Tell them who qualifies. Tell them where to go. Tell them what the program has actually accomplished.

No jargon. No victory lap. No bu****it. Information.

But the Question Goes Both Ways

Government does not carry the entire responsibility for democracy. We have one too.

If we are going to say politics does not work for us, we should know who represents us. If we criticize a policy, we should know what the policy actually does. If we say nothing has changed, we should at least be willing to investigate whether anything has.

And if somebody wants our vote, perhaps our questions need to become more sophisticated than whether we like them.

What power did you actually have? What did you do with it? Who benefited? Who didn't? Where did the money go? What changed? What can you prove?

Those questions should apply to Brandon Johnson. They should apply to the next mayor. They should apply to alderpersons, governors, presidents, state legislators and anybody else asking Black people to exchange political power for a promise.

Because a vote is power. And giving somebody power without understanding what they intend to do with it is a dangerous transaction.

Who Gets to Define Black Political Self-Interest?

Not Brandon Johnson. Not the Democratic Party. Not the Republican Party. Not political consultants. Not cable news. Not activists. Not wealthy donors. Not social media. And not me.

Black people do.

Individually. Collectively. Imperfectly. Sometimes contradictorily. And sometimes in fierce disagreement with one another.

But claiming the right to define our own political interests comes with responsibility. We have to understand power well enough to recognize when it is serving us and when it is using us.

We have to distinguish representation from performance. Promises from policy. Policy from implementation. Implementation from outcomes. And outcomes from political marketing.

Most importantly, we have to stop assuming that disagreement among Black people means somebody has betrayed Black people.

There may not be one Black political self-interest. There may be several.

But surely there are places where those interests meet: safe neighborhoods, functioning schools, economic opportunity, stable housing, accessible healthcare and mental-health care, accountable government, dignity, and a reasonable expectation that where you live should not determine how much suffering you are expected to tolerate.

Maybe Black political power was never supposed to mean that all of us vote the same. Maybe the greater expression of Black political power is that enough of us understand the machinery of government to know exactly what we are voting for.

That we know the difference between somebody who looks like us and somebody who governs in our interests. That we know when government has failed us—and when somebody is simply trying to convince us that it has.

That we cannot be bought with symbolism. Cannot be frightened into loyalty. Cannot be manipulated by party. Cannot be manipulated by race. Cannot be pacified by promises. And cannot be persuaded to surrender our political power because disappointment taught us that our power doesn't matter.

Black political power is not everybody in the room agreeing. It is everybody in the room understanding what is at stake.

Yes ChatGPT helped me write this.