After being elected as mayor of Chicago under the banner of gay black female progressive, Lori Lightfoot learned the hard way that identity cred only works as long as your every decision backs the tribe. As BLM protests, riots and looting threatened to leave her as mayor of the devastation formerly known as Chicago, she raised the bridges and sent out the riot troops. Despite all her victim points, she failed the team, and the team let her know it by going directly after her.

What’s a black female mayor to do?

In a letter sent Wednesday to local media, Lightfoot argued that the overwhelming maleness and Whiteness of Chicago’s press corps — in a city where roughly two-thirds of the residents are people of color — did not adequately reflect the population and was a detriment to local media coverage.

“As a person of color, I have throughout my adult life done everything I can to fight for diversity and inclusion in every institution that I have been part of and being Mayor makes me uniquely situated to shine a spotlight on this most important issue,” Lightfoot wrote.

Calling out the media for being too male and too white had the potential to re-establish some woke cred for Lightfoot. Whether white male journalists were “detrimental” to local media coverage may be true, even if it doesn’t logically follow. Whether the composition of the corps de media should “adequately reflect the population” is a separate question unless one’s expectation is that the media pulls random people off the street until they fill the quota. Otherwise, the question of skillset comes into play, and how that works out relative to the racial demographics of Chi Town can’t be found in Lightfoot’s letter.

But her “uniquely situated” place to “shine a spotlight” on the the media didn’t end with her questioning the maleness or whiteness of Chicago’s reporting class. Rather, Lightfoot backed up her challenge with a condition: She would only grant one-on-one interviews to mark the two-year anniversary of her inauguration solely to journalists of color

It had the potential to be a brilliant gambit. After all, if the white male media establishment complained, it would prove how racist and sexist they were, catching them in the Kafka trap for the win. As for the marginalized media, how could they not applaud this bold, brave anti-racist anti-sexist position taken by the once-and-again progressive mayor?

Except it didn’t quite work out as well as Lightfoot anticipated.

Reporters who were offered interviews told The Post the mayor’s office did not disclose to them that it was extending sit-downs only to reporters of color.

What at first appeared to be a good media “get” turned into an affirmative action embarrassment. They didn’t get the interview because they were great reporters, but because they had the right skin color and genitalia. Even the white reporters who couldn’t bring themselves to face facts uttered minor gripes.

Paris Schutz, who co-anchors “Chicago Tonight” for PBS affiliate WTTW, said Lightfoot’s criteria for interviews were unclear. Schutz, who is White, requested an interview last week and was turned down. When he was told the policy, he noted to Lightfoot’s press team that his co-anchor, Brandis Friedman, is a Black woman and was not offered an interview.

Schutz said he did not feel slighted by Lightfoot’s policy and is already planning a future interview with the mayor. But he bristled at the prospect of turning over editorial control to a subject.

“We’re not going to let the mayor’s office pick who gets to interview [her],” he said.

But the burden of clearly calling Lightfoot out fell to a Latino reporter.

I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them. https://t.co/YMW8M8ZgJm

— Gregory Royal Pratt (@royalpratt) May 19, 2021

The media has long had difficulty both hiring and assigning black and Hispanic reporters. Too often, it was seen as a token job, and they were assigned to their race beat, where they were assigned the stories that connected with their racial communities rather than just being given any assignment like any other reporter.

Then again, when people like Lightfoot attempt to rationalize the need for more “reporters of color” because their population isn’t “reflected” in the race or gender of the media and so reporting on these communities lacks the insight of a journalist of the same race or sex, it’s the same dynamic of “give the Latino reporter the Latino stories” rather than whatever story is up next. Are black and Latino reporters just reporters like any other reporter or are they only needed by, and limited by, their race?

But Lightfoot’s gambit was more press release than substance, as it came as a momentary gift to minority reporters for the second anniversary of Lightfoot’s election. Once the party was over, everything would return to normal.

The mayor’s letter has provoked what have so far remained unanswerable questions by the city’s press corps, which has not reached anything resembling an accord on what to make of a temporary policy that has been argued with equal force as uplifting, divisive or tokenizing.

Lightfoot’s effort falls short because it does not address systemic issues and doesn’t actually expand opportunities, argued Florence Chee, who directs the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University in Chicago.

While this comes from academia rather than anyone who works for a living, the complaint with Lightfoot’s gambit is not that it’s divisive or tokenizing, but that it’s temporary.

“There’s lots of ways to be anti-racist, but this isn’t it,” she told The Post. “It goes back to tokenism and putting people of color in an awkward position by focusing the topic at hand on them rather than on the government.”

What Chee means is anybody’s guess. Should the government mandate quotas for the race and gender of reporters, or just preclude them from interviews, perhaps press conferences? But one thing is clear: When a government official, even one with as many victim points as Lori Lightfoot, goes full racist and sexist to pander to the woke identity team, the gambit will still prove more likely to blow up than to win back progressive cred.