A recent 30 second political mud-slinging ad against Democratic Governor JB Pritzker features a clip from Apr 19, 2022 of Mayor Lori Lightfoot addressing the City Club of Chicago and saying that Memorial Day would mark Chicago’s “summer of joy” with her skin tone noticeable darker than the original video.
After the clip of Lightfoot, the ad shows several violent crimes unfolding on Chicago’s streets and warns in big, bold lettering that “Chicago violence is coming to the suburbs.”
Lightfoot was understandably taken aback by the obvious darkening of her skin by the far right PAC. “News flash. I’m Black and I’m proud. Everyone knows it. No need to use cheap tricks to darken my skin and try to scare voters with false narratives about Chicago,” Lightfoot said in a statement to NBC News.
The ad titled, The Summer of Joy was made by conservative super PAC People Who Play By The Rules, which is run by conservative political operative Dan Proft and appears to be completely funded by heir to the Schlitz brewing fortune, American billionaire, and businessman Richard Ellis Uihlein who has contributed $28,095,000 to the PAC since March of this year.
Uihlein has been a long time donor to Republicans who share his ultra-conservative views. Uihlein is a staunch social and economic conservative, with views that are anti-union, anti-tax, and pro-deregulation. He has a history of supporting far-right candidates, and has often supported efforts in opposition to gay and transgender rights. He has supported conservative groups and candidates including Ted Cruz, Roy Moore, The Club for Growth, and the Illinois Policy Institute. Uihlein most recently has been giving money to the PAC in an effort to boost Republican Darren Bailey’s campaign for governor however Bailey allegedly doesn’t have anything to do with the ad personally.
People Who Play By The Rules PAC has a YouTube channel with just 169 subscribers and currently 27 videos, all political in nature yet claim they are not endorsed by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
Darkening the skin tone of POC in photographs and videos is nothing new. In 1994 Time magazine ran a controversial cover photo of O.J. Simpson’s mugshot that seemed to have been intentionally altered to make Simpson’s skin look darker than normal. At the time, Time was criticized for manipulating Simpson’s appearance to make him seem more menacing, and therefore more likely to be perceived as guilty of his accused crimes. Eventually, after public backlash, James Gaine, then the magazine’s managing editor was forced to issue a public apology.
In 2017 Scientific American shared data from two studies where the researchers specifically looked at whether the media tends to run darker photographs of celebrities and politicians when writing about their transgressions. The researchers discovered a relationship between the written content of an article and the skin tone in the accompanying photograph: Articles containing negative content were more likely to appear alongside darker colored photographs. The studies showed that regardless of race, dark skin was associated with evil in the minds of people who saw a link between darkness and “badness”.
Proft denied Lightfoot’s charge of racism. “That is insane — and par for the course from inveterate race hustlers like Lightfoot and Pritzker trying to misdirect attention away from the fact that she has turned the city over to repeat, violent predators and he aims to do the same statewide with his elimination of cash bail,” Proft said in an email to NBC News’ Natasha Korecki. “Their contention is completely untrue and patently absurd. We did nothing to her pigmentation just as we did nothing to pigmentation of our pasty blowhard of a governor. The video of Lightfoot was pulled from the web from her City Club speech.”
