Chi-Raq: “This Is An Emergency”
This article was originally written for the now-defunct Fresh U online undergraduate magazine in 2016. The article, including photos, is available on my Medium, but the writing itself is available here for easy viewing.
Chi-Raq, a film directed by Spike Lee, is a serious satire film based off an older Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The film’s main premise is that the women of the South Side of Chicago band together to successfully end gang violence by withholding sex for three months, making this a modern adaptation of the original play where women did the same to end the Peloponnesian War. This star-studded film has extremely sexual overtones, is comedic at many points, and is disliked by a lot of people, from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to Chance the Rapper. I was lucky enough to attend a screening and Q-and-A with the critically acclaimed director himself to gain more insight. Let’s talk about it.
While the film catches a lot of criticism for glorifying violence, I think the message of this film more closely aligns with something said in Tim O’Brien’s 1990 book The Things They Carried: “It’s not a war story, it’s a love story”. While Spike Lee didn’t grow up in Chicago, it’s clear that he knows people who did because even the film’s name draws on informal truths running through the city.
Chicago has many nicknames, and while the most well-known is the “Windy City”, many people of color call it something different. Because of the gang violence widely associated with the city, many Chicagoans refer to it both affectionately and unaffectionately as “Chi-Raq”. Calling Chicago “Chi-Raq” makes it sound like there is an actual war happening in Chicago, and in a way there is. As Spike Lee points out both in the film and in person with statistics, the city has higher death tolls than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
While the film doesn’t shy away from the dangerous reality facing many Chicago residents, it’s about so much more than its sensational plotlines and focuses more on the unseen loss and grief that follow the headline-making violence. In one scene of the film, a mother scrubs the blood of her dead 7-year-old daughter, who got caught in gang crossfire, off a sidewalk with her bare hands. It’s scenes like these in the film that remind the viewer that the violence plaguing the city hurts far more people than those committing the acts themselves, and reasonably not everyone living through that level of trauma has the resources to cope with it effectively.
At this point, I should mention my personal connection to the film that definitely leaves me biased albeit sympathetic to its message.
At one point during Chi-Raq, one of the characters mentions her daughter having been shot in the Cabrini-Green projects. The Cabrini-Green projects were low-income housing projects predominantly housed by Black families, and my own dad grew up there before they were torn down and turned into expensive high-rise condos.
When I asked about what it was like to grow up there he said, “The building was weird. They had candy stores in the building, but it was just someone who bought a bunch of candy and snacks and sold it from their house. There was a woman who sold ice cream. It was a place where everyone was super poor, except for the drug dealers and their families. I remember one day, I was like 5 or 6, there was a guy and they rushed him into the house. I’m pretty sure he was shot in the face. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that”. The violence that took place in the 80s isn’t just an abstract concept the film presents to viewers, it’s something Chicagoans lived through and live with decades later. While my dad said described the turmoil as “violence you don’t think is real”, the film brings justice to all those without a platform to share their real stories.
This film is a work of fiction based on sad truth. Spike Lee brought two guests with him for his Q-and-A portion, Brandon Jackson and Kurt Tolger, likely to speak to experiences he can’t. Each guest is a formerly convicted felon and gang member who tell similar heartbreaking stories. Jackson discusses how he became a gang member, was arrested, and experienced the murder of his mother all between the ages of 11 and 13. Tolger explains that he’s “been shot 6 times on five different occasions,… once in the head… and been charged with murder probably 3 times” as well as how he “found [his mom] dead in a garage across the street [from his house]”. As Kurt Tolger says, “We [Chicago] are the poster child for violence”.
Hearing things like this breaks your heart, not just because of the pain it causes individuals but because of how widespread this type of hurt is. As Spike Lee said, “It’s not just Chi-raq….It’s not just Chicago”. He might not have meant the North Shore where most Northwestern students live, something I can infer from when characters in the film are discussing guns and say “Kenilworth, Wilmette, Highland Park… This gun wouldn’t be caught dead there”, but he wouldn’t be right. This pain and violence is present in Evanston and its surrounding neighborhoods that many Northwestern students call their hometowns. Tolger said, “hurt people hurt people… [and] violence begets violence”, and there are hurt people everywhere.
Skokie, a town neighboring Evanston, is jokingly called “Skompton” in a reference to Compton, another city infamous for gang violence and Black-on-Black crime. The town is the hometown of dozens of Northwestern alumni and was also the site of a shooting that left one Niles North High School senior dead and another seriously injured. At the end of January this year, a shooting occurred near Family Focus, an organization providing after-school enrichment programming for middle school students in Evanston and a place where many current Northwestern and Evanston Township High School students volunteer. If this wasn’t enough for you to see that this issue of gun and gang violence impact the Northwestern community, The Daily reported that “[Northwestern] accepted nearly twice as many students from Chicago Public Schools as last year…[and] higher numbers and percentages of underrepresented minority students… and… low income students than last year”. Even if it’s something you don’t think is relevant to you now, it will be important very soon for future Northwestern classes. More and more of your peers will be directly impacted by this kind of violence, and it’s important to be aware of the harsh realities of the environments they never chose to be in that likely still impact them today.
While the film contains enough despair to fill several lifetimes, there are still messages of hope. There are multiple shots of uplifting graffiti from around the city that say things like “Believe” and “Keep Loving Each Other”, left there as another homage to the city’s realities. Many people don’t know this, but it’s illegal to buy or sell spray paint within Chicago because of how widespread the graffiti problem has become, and the city doesn’t like it even if the messages are positive and not gang-related.
Tolger said, “I can’t change me being a black peace star. … It’s on my record, it’s gon be there forever…but I can change”. In the film, one of the women says, “People change when they decide to change”. So why don’t we make a change Northwestern? Let’s start paying attention and fighting for better lives for the people who live around us both within our school and in the surrounding neighborhoods we claim as ours.
The film opens and ends with a woman’s voice repeating, “This is an emergency”. This is an important takeaway from this film, and possibly its most important message, because she is right. Spike Lee is right. This is an emergency, and it impacts more than the South and West sides of Chicago most associated with gang violence. It impacts us here at Northwestern too, and hopefully, at this point of the article, you see that too.