“To choose a reporter based on the color of their skin is really pretty outrageous,” Ahern, who is white, said on WGN Radio. “Does she think I’m racist? Is that what she’s saying?”

The TRiiBE, a Chicago-based digital Black media platform, was granted a one-on-one interview with Lightfoot on Wednesday.

Reporter Bella Bahhs represented The TRiiBE in Wednesday’s interview and heavily scrutinized the 58-year-old, challenging the mayor to prove that she sincerely relates to the community she is supposed to represent.

One of Bahhs’ questions specifically demanded Lightfoot to explain who she is “accountable to in this world.”

“I’m accountable to my heritage. I’m accountable to the sacrifice that my parents made to put me in a position that I could succeed beyond their wildest expectations and dreams for themselves,” the Chicago politician said. “I’m accountable to the people who elected me [and] who wanted to see something different.”

But the reporter wasn’t satisfied with the answers.

“I’d hoped our first Black woman mayor would have mentioned the Black and brown Chicagoans who have been subjected to redlining and government-sanctioned anti-Blackness, and how those issues shaped the lives of many Black people whose families migrated from the South only to discover there was no refuge from racial violence here either,” Bahhs wrote in her column.

According to the journalist, many Black Chicago families have continued to struggle with housing and job discrimination, school segregation, fascist police and more since the Great Migration.

Bahhs continued her line of questioning and concluded that the mayor, who was raised in a predominantly white community in Massillon, Ohio, failed to identify some of the Black community on the west and south sides of Chicago. The reporter also said Lightfoot demonstrated a lack of understanding of LGBTQ+ issues.   

“When I asked her which Black Chicago liberation struggle resonated most with her, she didn’t mention any of the Black queer-led movements to end criminalization of Black LGBTOIA people and dismantle systems that perpetuate institutional racism and intersectional oppression,” Bahhs wrote. “Instead, she told me about her brother Brian Lightfoot’s 17-year stint in a federal prison for possession of and intent to distribute crack cocaine.”