Former White House chief of staff and then Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is angling for a Cabinet position that he doesn’t deserve and President-elect Joe Biden, who promised Black voters that he’d have our backs, needs to make it crystal clear, right now, that this will never happen.
The mere fact that this even has to be said right now as the nation still wrestles with the racial unrest around the extrajudicial killings of unarmed Black people hurts enough. Biden can’t heal the soul of America at the expense of further compromising the political safety and security of progressives. By preaching the need for all of us to find “common ground,” even with those who are affiliated with white supremacists, Biden has already proven himself willing to agitate progressives for bipartisan appeal, but putting Emanuel in his cabinet would be a true betrayal.
In October 2014, a 17-year old Black teen named Laquan McDonald was fatally shot 16 times by a white Chicago cop named Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke, who would later be found guilty of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, was caught on police dashcam footage committing the crime. But the city of Chicago on Emanuel’s watch actively conspired to hide that footage from the public until after his heated re-election campaign had concluded. Emanuel won a second term thanks to that loathsome deception, only to choose to leave his dream job rather than face voters again now that they knew he was willing to deceive them and cover up a police murder to salvage his own political career.
