Lost in the controversy surrounding Jussie Smollett is a city grappling with a shift in political power and who gets to control the resources of the state.

Jussie Smollett may be a fraud. Many media outlets have written about the conspiracy involved his assault by men wearing MAGA hats; he was allegedly brutalized for being black and gay. The government of Chicago has investigated, charged him, and then dropped all charges—and are now trying to force Smollett to pay for the investigation by threatening him and all that chose to work with him with economic sanctions. All this for an action that had no true victims.

Because of the MAGA connection, right wing media has transformed Smollett into their latest boogeyman. Intersectionality—he is black, he is gay—has given them quite a potent target. He arises from what white America considers the country’s nightmare metro area. All across the right side of the political spectrum, Chicago is held as an example of the dangers of Democratic rule and the supposed pathology of black culture.

It is questions of political power and black personhood, however, that generates their animus.

Chicago is the American city. More so than New York or Los Angeles, it represents the hopes and failures of the American experiment. It emerged through a convergence of capital, location, migration, and immigration. It hosts various permutations of the Horatio Alger myth, and the grit that defines Americana. At the same time, it is also a model of how the state has intentionally segregated black people from accessing that dream. Chicago is among the most segregated cities in the nation. Its black quarters are hotbeds of violence. This is all due, first and foremost, to the deliberate policy decisions regarding housing, schooling, and policing made by the local government.

For much of history, Chicago’s political arena was the dominion of white men. That is going to change soon, as the two candidates for mayor are black women. This week, Chicago will either select Lori Lightfoot or Toni Preckwinkle to lead them. Both of their campaigns made promises to begin chipping away at the structures of white supremacy.

At the center of their platforms is their allegiance to the federal government’s consent degree for the Chicago Police Department. The CPD’s treatment of black citizens is torturous. This is not hyperbole. The CPD murdered Laquan McDonald and then engaged in a cover-up of the action. The CPD operated Harmon Square, removing black people from public view and subjecting them to interrogations and imprisonment in gross violation of the Constitution and human decency. These are among the most recent of the atrocities the department has committed. The consent degree is the first step toward long-term reformation. The conman from New York and his administration has show hostility to such consent agreements, preferring the status norm of violence and police maleficence.

Accountability and power—this is on the horizon for Chicago’s black citizens due to the upcoming election and why the right cannot let go of the Smollett story. There has been a fear, in the words of John Wilkes Booth, of “black citizenship” (I have censored the actual term) since emancipation. A decade after the Civil War, southern blacks found themselves again in a state of disenfranchisement and peonage. They fled to Chicago and found themselves redlined at every turn. The redlining isolated them from the city’s full political and economic life. Even Martin Luther King Jr’s moral suasion could not persuade the powers that be to permanently make changes for the betterment of all of Chicago’s citizens.            

Now the city has raised leaders from said communities to begin the counter. Lightfoot and Preckwinkle are poised to begin dismantling the structures that causes the CPD to prioritize a high case of fraud and publicity instead of the endemic corruption and incompetence that infests their ranks. The changing of the guard is thus going to herald a new allocation of justice. That is always going to make white people nervous.

Black leadership of Chicago may finally mean the systems that keep west and south Chicago separated from the wealthier parts of the city are dismantled. It may mean that Chicago may become an exemplar of Democratic rule. It will definitely mean that the city’s systems of justice will work toward cleansing the corrupt and criminal within the system and focusing less on the stunts of Jussie Smollett.

Chicago is posed to prove the MAGATrain that their ideas of what makes the American City is wrong. The railroading of Smollett is simply the flailing of a power structure that is on the way out.