Death and Taxes: The Death and Destruction of the Fair Tax Fight in Illinois-Where We Go from Here

Upon arrival in Illinois in 2018, I was eager to throw myself into organizing for a progressively healthier Cook County and state that held high regard for the future of Black people. My ear was to the ground and I began to familiarize myself with a Chicago that looked, smelled, and felt very different from what I had left behind 11 years ago. Neighborhoods that were once heavily Black were now heavily populated with White constituents, condos, dog parks, and coffee shops. My first question was “Where did all the Black people go?” My second question was why wasn’t all of this fancy money used to better our neighborhoods when Black people were living here?” My third question was probably the most important of all; “Who’s organizing the Black folks that have left Chicago and how has our voting block shifted?”

Anyone that truly works from a lens that includes the trifecta, hindsight-insight-foresight, could see right off the bat that the effects of Black flight from Cook County would essentially affect the voting power of Cook County and essentially that of the state. The impact extends pass voting power to the overall progressive agenda. Because of this, it would be essential for organizers to examine the future of our blue island in a red state and also how we would need to be creative with organizing across the entire state of IL to capture the voices and priorities of Black folks and authentically engage and pass progressive legislation. The most impactful and important example that points to and explains the critical nature of not only the decade long Cook County and IL demographic shift and political influence it poses is the fight for Fair Tax.

Trust me when I say that the failure to pass the Fair Tax was not a random fluke but a clear consequence of not looking at the big picture. In 2019, I began organizing more heavily in Chicago and everyone’s main objective was winning the Fair Tax. This narrow agenda both triggered me and left me curious. How would or could the organizing community envision statewide legislation passing with a majority focus on Cook County, a major shift of Cook County voting block, and messaging that did not capture racially/socially disenfranchised voices consistently? Many organizers in the Black community know that issue campaigns for fair tax systems have never truly “caught on.” Many organizations have yet to produce a sound organizing strategy to help educate constituents and give them the inside understanding of how taxes would help fix our crumbling communities. Organizations and strategists don’t do a great job educating our communities on the real time flow of legislation from passage to actual manifestation in the lives of real people. Also, Black, Brown, and other disenfranchised communities have always been lied to when it came to certain funds being used to better our communities; for example, the state Lottery. So, all in all, passing a fair tax agenda with the voting block that needed to believe in it the most was going to be tricky.

Did the Fair Tax campaign factor these considerations at all ten years ago? Did strategists, policy writers and housing rights organizers factor the dramatic demographic shift of Black people out of Cook County when drafting new organizing field plans to win fair tax? Was there a pivot point at year five or six of campaigning for the Fair Tax where the organizing community knew it had to adjust its strategy, messaging, and communications in order to educate, support, and organize Black, Brown and other disenfranchised persons to support a fair tax crossing the finish line. This is important to explore because as we know, IL is only a Blue state and is able to support forms of progressive agendas because of Cook County and the singular city of Chicago that resides within it. The rest of the state and surrounding counties are less connected to a progressive agenda and in general fall into a republican voting bloc. With the shift of Illinois’ blue stronghold (Black voting block) moving out of Chicago and into more distant sectors of the county and across the state, a strategy to organize those that were affected by the housing crisis in Chicago that had now moved to various sectors of the state needed to occur; a strategy that addressed the racial and social injustices that caused the housing crisis head on, food insecurity, job insecurity, and community investment across the state and how winning the fair tax could help, not completely solve, the poverty and disenfranchisement many people across the state were feeling.

While taking in all of this information during the last quarter of 2019, I began to ask organizers if there were state alignment tables for both c3 and c4 organizations that strategized year-round on policy, community needs, legislation, and field strategy to secure wins that impacted Black, Brown, and other disenfranchised communities. The resounding answer was no. A couple months into my new position, I also began speaking to funders about the existence of alignment tables and any insights into if they would be built in the future. The answers were the same unfortunately but the more I spoke on their importance and the statewide policy pushes that needed to become manifested, positive conversations began to happen.

A state as important as Illinois, when we discuss the future of Black lives and the security of the “Blue Wall”, not having alignment tables that coordinate year-round (in and out of election seasons) is a major political ding. In this day and age, having a shared ideology, language, communication strategy, policy agenda, legislative wish list, and collective vision amongst organizing bodies that spans beyond a city or county is crucial to combating opposition, building sustainable relationships in communities, and also being more prepared for curves in the road.

Insert the pandemic that threw an already impoverished voting block into a “new recession”, the lack of access points of education around Fair Tax and physical support to Black, Brown and Indigenous to help them combat the onslaught of a crippling time made passing the Fair Tax even more impossible in my opinion. The pandemic changed the way everyone organized but some things should have remained a priority during the final crunch time of election season of 2020. Reaching disenfranchised communities across the state, especially those in rural and republican districts, counties, or wards was so important. One must understand and deal with the fact that Black people for the most part, especially communities my organization organized in, didn’t have everyday access to the internet. The majority of Fair Tax organizing had shifted to online platforms where disenfranchised persons were not present. Education and investment in civic engagement takes place best in person for Black communities. There was not a sound ground or communications plan around how to get information and resources to disenfranchised communities across the entire state outside of online platforms and phone-banking.

In July of 2020, my organization began traveling outside of Cook County to meet with a new community of organizers in Kankakee County; this county is only an hour and a half south of Chicago and a place I lived for three years. We began speaking on the uprising and demands for police accountability in both of our counties. I asked if they knew about the work being done to pass the Fair Tax in Illinois and they were completely ignorant about what the Fair Tax was and the fact that it would be voted on by every person eligible to vote in Illinois in the upcoming general election. Our organization started sharing information with them after that meeting so they could push it out to constituents in Kankakee County, but the most important takeaway from that meeting was that this demographic hadn’t been reached over the last 9 years regarding a crucial progressive tax push. Of course, one would know that this singular county isn’t an anomaly but a clear indication of how we need to get more intentional around local and statewide strategies to truly engage, support, strengthen our progressive voting blocs wherever they may be.

The lesson to learn here for sure is one that is as old as time but rings true in most human interactions…especially in organizing; Know your audience. Studying the nature of how people are civically engaged, communicate, understand politics and their social/economic shifts are foundations for building strong and winnable campaigns. And not just winnable campaigns, but campaigns that are built with directly impacted people and that they believe in. One of the biggest blows to the Fair Tax campaign came toward the last month of field activity. The opposition, millionaires-billionaires, and the republican party, simply unleashed a tidal wave of disparaging ads that spoke to not only the average American’s fear of tax hikes but it also spoke to impoverished communities that were ravished economically due to the pandemic and had little interest in voting for a new tax structure. Targeted voting blocks were easily swayed to stay far away from a new tax system and these final weeks of the campaign push proved difficult. I would have to say that going forward, any major policy or legislative campaign needs to incorporate the following methods:

• Build c3 and c4 alignment tables
• Strategize with grassroots, tops, established organizations, and the communities they serve
• Infuse mutual aid into strategy
• Create short, mid, and long-term local and statewide goals to support progressive agendas
• Build creative partnerships that would provide a variety of access points to distribute information and engage constituents (i.e., Social service, direct service, small business, schools, places of worship, and libraries)
• Build community policy and messaging from the ground up and not TOP DOWN
• Strategically organize funding and field positions based on geographical and demographical needs

These methods ensure that field programs start to value the lived experiences and minds of Black people across the state. It also makes organizing a basic and everyday tenant of field plans in and out of the election season; field and policy strategists would have their hand on the pulse of an ever shifting demographic and one that is not a monolith. What organizations have to drill into their heads is that Black people think, feel, live, and engage in a myriad of ways and cannot be reached through singular or narrow messaging and access points to information. We must begin organizing with a larger lens that not only helps us see around the corner for new challenges as well as behind us for lessons learned, but also with a lens that sees and understands the value of protecting an impacted community’s human dignity. Let the Fair Tax fight be a lesson to every organizer because we must change how we win from the ground up in order to bring about the winds of progressive change that are needed and well overdue for our people.