Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s highly-anticipated film, depicts gun violence that simultaneously shapes and disrupts everyday life in the South Side of Chicago. Flying bullets and the grief they cause are equally ingrained in the social fabric of the neighborhood. As locals cope with their turbulent reality, Lee’s latest explores the ways they can end the chaos.
And it’s already stirred up a great deal of controversy in the days leading up to its release. Critics have argued Chi-Raq is exploitative of black pain and poverty, insults black women by reducing them to sexual objects, perpetuates the myth of the sex strike, and doesn’t actually tell the unique story of violence in Chicago.
“We don’t experience the emotional toll of young people being lured to the streets, ultimately giving in to a tug of war between good and evil,” wrote Chicago Tribute reporter Dahleen Glanton. “We don’t see the more insidious costs of the violence — the broken families, the loss of hope and the defeatist attitude among youths that being born into Chiraq means they are destined to die young.”
It also comes at an uncomfortable time. As Black Lives Matter activists fight police brutality, they’re also fighting the conservative, white supremacist narrative that black-on-black crime is the only danger. With Chi-Raq, Lee is wading into tricky territory: telling a violent story without perpetuating the Vicious Black Thug stereotype.
It’s a fine line that black filmmakers have had to walk since cinema’s earliest days, when black characters were portrayed as wild and beast-like.
“If you look back on the criticism of African-American cinema and the violence in African-American cinema, and the interpretation of violence, it’s not seen so much as a militant act of protection or of some expression of some larger cultural critique. It’s purely seen as violent,” Sheril Antonio, Associate Dean of the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television at NYU’s Tisch, told ThinkProgress.
When the earliest movies were made, the country was still segregated. Black people made movies that catered to a black audience and weren’t considered mainstream. Without any cultural exchange, white filmmakers who included black characters in their movies relied on stereotypes of the black buck and the angry black woman.
Only recently has it become possible for black people to tell nuanced, well-rounded stories about themselves. Black filmmakers like Lee are trying to shrug off that cinematic legacy while grappling with the cultural moment.
“So here we are, trying to move away from the early cinema, Birth of a Nation and so many other films, that depicts the black savage or the Native American savage,” Antonio said. “To have a character fight without engaging the violence that might be seen in that stereotypical way is a very tricky undertaking…All you hear in the media is black people and their association to violence.”
Perhaps that’s why writers and directors in the past few years have opted for nonviolent representations in historical biopics like 12 Years a Slave and Selma and movies with contemporary storylines like Dope. When there is onscreen violence, white people are usually the ones committing it.
“Looking at Selma, even though we all know that MLK was a nonviolent person, the film…revealed a level of tenderness, and quiet, and humanity that wasn’t visible,” Antonio continued. “It went even deeper. Same thing with 12 Years a Slave. The empathy the audience has for this genteel, upper-class man and the violence done against him is put in stark contrast to the violence against the savage African.”
At the same time, filmmakers have to reckon with modern-day realities.
“The black image is always in conversation with the present times and history itself,” Antonio said. “Think about this cultural moment, where so much violence is being perpetuated globally and nationally against black people.”
That includes gang violence. But Lee isn’t the only who’s taking it on. In Dope, Malcolm, a nerdy black teen from Inglewood with an affinity for 90s hip hop, wants to go to college so he can steer clear of gang activity. Chi-Raq tells the opposite story, with black gang members burning down houses, shooting off AKs, and killing a little girl.
For all of its faults, the movie is Lee’s attempt at bringing a current cultural experience to the big screen: the epidemic of gun violence in Chicago that’s left black boys, girls, men, and women, dead. More than 2,700 people have been shot this year alone.
And that’s a very difficult story to tell.
“Violence is a serious thing to engage for people of color,” Antonino noted. “We can never take up our self-representation without consciousness of how we have been represented, how we have been characterized, how we have been constructed, how we have been drawn.”