CHICAGO — Few voters imagined two black women would win the most votes in last Tuesday’s crowded mayoral primary race. A former police board president, Lori Lightfoot, will face a county board executive, Toni Preckwinkle, in a runoff on April 2, inaugurating a new era for the city’s racialized political landscape and notorious Democratic machine.

Chicago will soon have its first black female mayor.

An open seat for mayor, with no incumbent or preordained winner, is rarer than 80 degrees and sunny here in February. Voter turnout was low, at 34 percent, but the civic engagement and discourse around this election was robust. Chicago, my beautiful, darling city, is full of grit and resilience. Yet the decades of entrenched racial and economic segregation means the city is ready to combust.

Residents live and breathe inequality. They see cranes downtown and too much disinvestment in their neighborhoods. A shrinking middle class reflects a city getting richer on one end and poorer on the other. Public schools suffer from inequity. Distrust of the police in black and brown communities remains constant.

For national politicians, President Trump in particular, “Chicago” is shorthand for broken parts of this country. He loves to tweet about crime here without offering any meaningful solutions. My city is a punching bag. It needs help, and this election can change how outsiders see us.

Last fall, Mayor Rahm Emanuel stunned many people when he announced he wouldn’t seek a third term. There was a mad scramble to replace him. By Election Day, the field had dwindled from 21 mayoral hopefuls at the peak to a still-astonishing pool of 14 candidates. They represented a mix of interests, geography, ideology, experience and race.

For months, the electorate challenged candidates. Every week, multiple groups held mayoral forums on broad and niche issues — early childhood education, food justice, arts and neighborhood development. One forum billed itself as “plans not platitudes.” Engaged voters demanded answers.

I’ve long lamented that elected officials neither acknowledge nor work to dismantle segregation, the defining nature of Chicago. That is slowly starting to change. One community group put together a guide in which candidates answered questions, selected by voters, on racial equity. Half the candidates answered.

They fielded questions on whether they supported rent control, raising the minimum wage, reopening mental health clinics, creating green jobs in black and brown communities, replacing the police in schools with wraparound services and ending tax breaks for wealthy corporations.

And voters, activists and organizers are primed to command accountability by whichever black woman takes the keys to City Hall.

Money didn’t completely determine the outcome. The candidate with the biggest war chest — William Daley — had a familiar last name. His brother and father served as mayor for four decades. And the richest person in Illinois, Ken Griffin, who recently bought the most expensive home in the country, a penthouse in New York, donated $2 million to William Daley. Yet Mr. Daley still placed third.

So it is indeed historic that the sun may have set on the Daley dynasty. The state of black politics in the city is changing, too, and complicates for some the idea of who a black candidate is and represents. Ms. Lightfoot and Ms. Preckwinkle won by harnessing votes across racial lines, not just by capturing the black vote. How the chips fall will be based on their message, political baggage and appeal.

Ms. Preckwinkle is the Cook County Board president and a seasoned elected official on the South Side who supports criminal justice reform. She has a political base. She’s derided by some as “Queen Sugar” for having cast the tie-breaking vote for a sweetened-beverage tax in 2017 to balance the county budget. Taxpayers recoiled; the backlash was so severe that it was repealed within months. Ms. Preckwinkle also faces criticisms for being too cozy with people in office tied to corruption.

Enter Ms. Lightfoot, who could also become the city’s first openly gay mayor. A powerful TV commercial presents her as an outsider, uninterested in smoke-filled, back-room deals. She was the head of Mr. Emanuel’s police reform task force that called for impressive and sweeping changes. But some people can’t reconcile her image as reformer with her past. She’s a corporate lawyer and former prosecutor, and she sat on a now-disbanded police disciplinary agency criticized for not firing bad police officers.

Over the next several weeks, I imagine the two pragmatic women will compete to see who is a real progressive. The first female mayor was Jane Byrne, a white woman elected in 1979. Harold Washington was the first black mayor elected in 1983. In these first few days of the 2019 runoff, I’m already cringing at comments about Ms. Preckwinkle and Ms. Lightfoot that sound sexist — based on neither policy nor legitimate critiques.

I hope regressive racial and gender politics don’t undermine this race. Black women know this double-edged sword all too well. We have a front-row seat to how black women in the public eye are treated — whether it’s not believing black girls who survived sexual abuse or questioning a woman’s blackness or her love of country.

I hope that, this year, a woman leading Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, will symbolize something else. Not a proxy punching bag for the city.

Natalie Y. Moore (@natalieymoore), a reporter at WBEZ-Chicago, is the author of “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.”

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