Politicians granting access to favoured journalists is nothing new. But granting access to particular racial groups is something else entirely. What if a white politician announced that he was only going to talk to white journalists? All hell would break loose, and rightly so. It is repellent to think that skin colour should be the basis of how we treat people in society and professional life. But thanks to the Democrats’ promotion of ‘equity’, racial discrimination is making a comeback. Worse still, this is being cheered on by the media. Maudlyne Ihejirika, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, defended Lightfoot: ‘If a mayor of the third-largest city wants to step up at this time in history and say, “Here is my effort, here was my reparative measure to address the media sector”, what is the big deal? I say kudos.’ The TRiiBE, a black-oriented media platform based in Chicago, said the real outrage was the criticism of Lightfoot. ‘With this outrage, y’all are implying that black and brown journalists aren’t capable of asking the hard questions’, it tweeted. You would have thought Lightfoot would have bigger issues to address than journalists’ skin colour, given the parlous situation in Chicago. Killings were up by more than 50 per cent in 2020, and are accelerating at a similar pace so far this year. Last weekend, at least 43 people were shot across Chicago, 12 of them fatally. The dead included a 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head while sitting on the front porch of his home.