It must be just awful to be a “first” in a high-profile position. To have to live up to the high standards of people with only a second-hand understanding of your job, the circumstances under which you attempt to do it and the expectations of the group you represent.
You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy, and you can imagine how high Chicagoans’ hopes were when Anita Alvarez became the first female, first Hispanic and first career prosecutor elected to the post of Cook County state’s attorney.
With the election of the first African-American president, election night 2008 felt like a whole new chapter, one in which those who had been historically denied justice or opportunity would finally get the chance to advance both.
Like the Chicago-cultivated Barack Obama, Alvarez saw herself as something of a “post-racial” heir to a bureaucracy — the second largest prosecutor’s office in the nation — that had for years been accused of turning a blind eye to police corruption, abuse of power, racial profiling, torture and more.
In the run-up to her win, Alvarez — who made her name in 2001 prosecuting the shocking “Girl X” sexual assault case in which a 9-year-old-girl was left paralyzed, blind and unable to speak after a brutal attack in a city housing project — refused to play the “Latina card.”
At the time, I asked Alvarez why, in a city so stuck on the white-black-Hispanic dynamic, she didn’t campaign as a trailblazing Latina.
“I’ve always said: More than being Hispanic or being a woman, I’m the most qualified to run,” Alvarez told me. “When I won the primary everyone asked: ‘Was it because she’s a woman? Was it because she’s Latino?’ Well, those are all good things, things I’m proud of — and they probably enhanced me as a candidate — but above all else, I’m the most qualified candidate. And I think that’s what stands out.”
Alvarez lost her bid for re-election last week and will forever stand out as a disappointment for her lack of action on the very racial and ethnic issues that made her arrival in the beleaguered office so inspiring.
Before she was elected, I admired her stance, and wrote that Alvarez was to be applauded “for having run a campaign devoid of any of the standard ‘breaking-the-glass-ceiling’ or ‘first’ this-that-or-other platitudes a lesser candidate would have fallen back on.”
But if we’re to look at what has troubled observers of President Obama’s tenure, as well as what eventually bedeviled Alvarez, it seems that the trick for a minority leader is not to solely run on merit, but to also allow yourself to bring your uniqueness to bear on your new responsibility.
Had a white, male Cook County state’s attorney been the one to take more than a year to indict the killer of Laquan McDonald — the 17-year-old African-American who was shot 16 times by a police officer — ignoring the pleas of advocates who fought to get the video footage of his death released, it would have been a tragic instance of corrupt Chicago’s business as usual.
But the delay of justice seemed worse because so many had expected a Latina to really understand the fraught relationship between minorities and police. Instead, she let the investigation drag on, hastily filing charges only after a judge ordered the video made public.
In the end, Alvarez was reviled by many, even by some who might have been assumed to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“She got exactly what she deserved,” said Emma Lozano, a longtime community activist and co-chair of the Latino rights advocacy nonprofit Familia Latina Unida. “She was never responsive. She acted like the Latino community wasn’t important because she had the Democratic Party’s endorsement. She had the opportunity to be a role model that young people could aspire to, to really be part of the solution, but instead she was just like the cronies before her.”
It’s naive to imagine anyone single-handedly reforming an entrenched police culture. But in not taking advantage of her connection to the city’s minority community, Alvarez may have missed out on a shot to really stick up for them.
Washington Post Writers Group
Esther J. Cepeda is a syndicated columnist.
Twitter @estherjcepeda
