Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times
Mayor Lori Lightfoot will never forget the moment she first learned Black Chicagoans were dying from the coronavirus at seven times the rate of “any other demographic.” She felt like “someone had literally knocked the wind out of me.”
Fearing a similar disparity among Latinos, Lightfoot knew she could not reveal those startling statistics without also “offering up some concrete solutions.”
She spent the next few days pushing her team to devise an intensive outreach plan and telling them their initial responses “weren’t good enough” to confront the disparity. That’s how Chicago’s “racial equity rapid response teams” were created.