THE SHADOW BEHIND THE REAL: SPIKE LEE DOES
CHICAGO
Jade D. Petermon
Who is speaking? Who is asking? And to what end? . . . What
happens in the shadow behind the “real” of Spike Lee once
it becomes hegemonic for African-Americans? In other
words, what happens when this “representation” is
accepted as “real”? What happens to the construction of
“Blackness” in the public discourse?
—Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What?”1
Chi-Raq (Spike Lee, 2015) opens with a series of graphic im-
ages accompanied by a textured aural landscape. First up is
a political map of the United States composed of small assault-rifle images in red, white, and blue. As the screen
fades to black, “Pray for My City” begins. It is a song written and performed by Nick Cannon, the actor who plays
the title character, Chi-Raq. The lyrics appear on the screen
in red, the words spelled out in various sizes. Cannon raps
as the words appear to the audience:
Please PRAY 4 My City
Too Much HATE In My City
Too Many Heartaches In My City
But I Got FAITH In My City
After the song ends, the words “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY” flash on the screen, accompanied by the same
phrase spoken on the soundtrack, speaker unknown. Three
more graphics appear in quick succession, superimposing
statistics over maps and flags of Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Chicago, informing the audience how homicide rates in
Chicago compare to deaths of American civilians in Iraq and
Afghanistan. According to the film, there have been 7,376
murders in Chicago between 2001 and 2015, compared to
2,349 American deaths in Afghanistan in the same period
and 4,424 in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.2 The graphics onscreen are accompanied by the sounds of war (explosions,
tanks) in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan and, in Chicago,
by the sounds of gunshots.
Film Quarterly, Vol. 70, Number 2, pp. 30–37, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.70.2.30.
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The view closes in on the final graphic of Chicago, revealing a map of neighborhoods on the South Side where the
film’s action will take place, as its outline slowly changes
from black and white to blood red. Out of this blood-red
screen emerges the film’s title, framed by a red, black, and
green flag (symbolizing the struggle for black liberation).
The flag contains a collection of stars and bars that combine
elements of the U.S. and Chicago flags. Then the voice of the
pastor of St. Sabina Church on Chicago’s South Side, Father
Pfleger, is heard: “These overwhelming numbers of homicides are committed by young black males against young
black males. Heaven help us all.”
This thick description of the film’s opening uncovers the
complex issues the film attempts to address and foreshadows
much that is to come, specifically its focus on three elements:
“black-on-black violence” caused by easy access to guns; Lee’s
attachment to the use and imagery of the portmanteau phrase,
Chi-Raq, in all its deceptive simplicity; and finally, an insistence that the opening pray-hate-faith injunction will take precedence over heartache.
As a native Chicagoan, I am familiar with the trope of
comparing deaths in Chicago to deaths in the global “war on
terror.” Every year, as spring gives way to summer, temperature and humidity rise to unbearable levels, and local news
stations begin their annual ritual of reporting the death tolls.
Always framed in racial terms, these reports perpetuate the
idea “that inner city blacks have become dangerously distanced from civility.”3 Lee’s use of this analogy throughout
his opening graphics accompanied by the lyrics of Cannon’s
song clarifies the source and meaning of the term, Chi-Raq.
Chicago rapper King Louie has linked his creation of the
term in 2009 to the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops as
well as to the creation and rise of the Drill music genre in
Chicago.4 Drill music is a derivative of 1990s gangsta rap and
focuses on gangs, drugs, and guns. King Louie explains that
he never expected the term, which in full is “Chiraq, Drillinois,” to become so popular.5
There has been a great deal of controversy over the
term “Chiraq” in Chicago, one that Lee acknowledges
Two of the series of graphic images that open the film Chi-Raq.
Statistics appear in the opening credits of Chi-Raq.
only superficially in the film. Some feel it dehumanizes
residents of the South and West sides, the predominantly
black neighborhoods where violence is the most prevalent.6 However, Father Pfleger—who was Lee’s primary
connection to Chicago on this project—and others have
publicly defended the use of the word.7 According to Pfleger,
the controversy over the word distracts from the real issues at hand. Commenting on a local alderman’s suggestion that Lee should forfeit his $3 million tax break
from the city because he titled the film Chi-Raq, Pfleger
remarked, “This is an orchestrated distraction . . . a
shell-game. Not dealing with the real issues of unemployment. The real issues of gangs. The real issues of education and options on the South Side of Chicago.”8 Pfleger
and Lee, then, are in agreement that black-on-black violence on Chicago’s South Side is an emergency. For them,
the moniker Chi-Raq is not the problem; the situation that
it names is the problem.
The themes covered in Chi-Raq, including the issue of
violence in black communities, are familiar territory for Lee.
Over the course of his nearly thirty-year career, Lee has consistently made films that are sociopolitically aware and praised
by critics for their keen “depth and relevance,” although with
“occasionally a touch of social-worker moralizing that reveals
a surprisingly conservative streak in his creative personality.”9
More important, Lee’s films show a “willingness to raise hard
questions and problems [that] confront contemporary America
Spike Lee, father Pfleger, and members of the Santa Sabina
congregation address a Chicago crowd and TV audiences
during Chi-Raq’s initial run. Photo courtesy of ABC7 Chicago
without claiming to have the illusory solutions and makebelieve answers that mainstream movies constantly peddle.
Lee’s pictures are designed to challenge and provoke us, not ease
our minds or pacify our emotions.”10
In his early work, such as School Daze (1988), Do the Right
Thing (1989), and Clockers (1995), Lee’s vision yielded complex, politically timely films that always felt relevant for
black audiences (even when misogynistic and homophobic).
However, Bamboozled (2000), his satire on black representation in the twenty-first century, marked a turning point: it
was considerably less popular with black audiences. Lee had
hoped to show that “in the new millennium you don’t have
to wear blackface to be a minstrel performer.”11 I suspect
that Bamboozled’s lack of popularity results from Lee’s use of
satire to elicit a critical engagement with questions of black
representation, rather than merely champion the fact of it.
Art historian Derek Conrad Murray contends that one
mode of black satire exists to “indict African American complicity with the system that exploits and marginalizes them
while simultaneously critiquing the dominant culture’s attitudes toward the Other.”12 In Bamboozled, Lee does exactly
that, elegantly exposing the ways in which black people
are often implicated within a larger system of problematic
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
31
representation and using satire to critique both individuals
and institutions, black and white alike. It is a film that merits
renewed attention.
In contrast to Bamboozled, however, Chi-Raq hits black
communities hard without any substantive critical engagement with the institutions that have helped create these
circumstances; as a result, Lee’s extended use of satire in
Chi-Raq is not nearly as effective. An adaption of the classical
Greek playwright Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, written
almost entirely in verse, his Chi-Raq follows the plot of
Lysistrata quite closely, with a few telling differences. In the
original Aristophanes drama, Lysistrata is an Athenian
woman who unites all Greek women, including the rival
Spartans, in a sex strike in order to put an end to the Peloponnesian War. In the original comedy, Lysistrata leads a
gang of “Old Women” in a successful occupation of the
(Greek) Treasury. In Lee’s adaptation, the film’s protagonist
is Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), a Chicago-based Drill hip-hop
artist and leader of a fictional South Side gang called the
Spartans, and his Lysistrata (Teyonah Paris) is Chi-Raq’s
girlfriend. She leads all the women in the neighborhood, including the women of the rival gang, the Trojans, in a sex
strike. In Lee’s version, Lysistrata and her followers take over
the United States Armory. While the play focuses primarily
on the sex strike, the film divides its attention between the sex
strike, the death of a small child who is killed by a stray bullet
from gang crossfire (prompting the sex strike), and Chi-Raq’s
personal story.
Lysistrata is one of Aristophanes’s most popular plays and
one of the most adapted.13 Its rise in popularity in recent years
may be due to its modern message of “make love not war”
and its seemingly feminist and pacifist theme. (In 2003, it was
used as part of a global protest against the impending Iraq
War.14) Some classicists have argued, however, that these are
misreadings of Aristophanes and that Lysistrata was not originally intended to be feminist. In 411 B.C., when it was originally performed, men would have played all of the female
characters; indeed, that impersonation is part of the intended
joke. According to Martin Revermann, “One crucial thing to
[realize] is that putting a woman into a position of political authority, control and power in a comedy is an important part of
the humor. It is funny, straightforwardly ridiculous, because it
blatantly (and fantastically) defies the reality of the world of
the audience.”15 Similarly, Revermann argues that the play
could not have been intentionally pacifist, as there was no
known philosophical school at the time that opposed war.16
Lee’s film is attempting to address both gender and war
through its satirical adaptation, as telegraphed by the official
tag line, “No Peace, No Piece.”17 However, as the opening of
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An official poster for the film features Lysistrata’s
(Teyonah Paris) torso emblazoned with the tagline “No
Peace, No Piece.”
Chi-Raq suggests, he believes that the emergency on the
South Side of Chicago is not a war with outsiders but an
internal one of black-on-black violence.
There has been a glut of research on the phenomenon of
so-called black-on-black violence since the 1980s. Geographer
David Wilson has noted that most studies on black-on-black
violence take for granted its basis in reality rather than as “a
racialized construct.”18 While violence is a reality in black
communities, it is also a reality in all communities. Blackon-black violence is a discursive construction that has been
deployed consistently since the 1980s to criminalize and dehumanize black communities, especially black youth. Wilson
argues that the rhetoric has been used “to create a villain,
black youth, that [has] had far reaching penal and legislative
ramifications. Black-on-black violence came to serve the political purposes of mayors, governors, senators, the penal community, law enforcement and others.”19
According to Wilson, despite the fact that crime reached
a twenty-year low in 1998, politicians, legislators, reporters,
Lee simplifies a complex issue in Chi-Raq, showing a gun cocked for action in the hands of a black man on the street, Sean
“Cyclops” Andrews (Wesley Snipes), and held up as a warning by the white man in the pulpit, Father Mike (John Cusack).
and pundits alike continued to use the language of black-onblack violence to impugn black youth and pass damaging
legislation that has had a drastic effect on black men’s lives,
reinforcing cultural critic Herman Gray’s argument: “Black
masculinity is . . . the site for the deployment . . . of ‘pathology’ as the primary cultural explanation for what threatens
the national body of the United States and the middle-class
body of blackness.”20 Spike Lee’s film, in its use of satire,
misfires because it inadvertently links black-on-black violence with the pathology of black masculinity.
In the first scene of Chi-Raq and Lysistrata together,
Chi-Raq makes several comparisons between his penis and
the gun he is in the midst of polishing. Lysistrata says, “We
could have gotten killed. I gotta look at that [she points to his
gun] tonight?” He replies, “Out of sight. I got another pistol
that’s gonna make everything aight.”21 This line, like many
others, demonstrates Chi-Raq’s awareness that his power is
linked to sex and violence. With a life story that includes
witnessing his mother having sex with a pimp as a boy, never
knowing his father, being introduced to sex by the same
pimp, and self-medicating with marijuana and Sprite spiked
with codeine, the character of Chi-Raq is constructed as the
embodiment of the fully pathologized black gang leader.22
Lee’s script thus individualizes and simplifies a complex
systemic issue, and as a result, reproduces the discourse of
black-on-black violence that David Wilson and others have
written to oppose.23 Additionally, with the narrative focus on
Chi-Raq, and with a parallel story concerning the accidental
murder of a young girl named Patty, Lee zeros in on the
faults of the community rather than either the original sex
strike or the larger issues of state violence at play in Chicago.
Further, in addition to reproducing a narrative of black
pathology through his narrative arc, Lee implicates the entire community through a motif of witnessing and fear.
Throughout the film, Lee uses the character of Father Mike
(John Cusack, as a filmic version of the real-life Father
Pfleger) to make points about many complex issues related
to inner-city violence: easy access to guns, poverty, unemployment, the state of education, the prison industrial complex, the civil rights movement, and so on.24
At the funeral for Patty, the young girl killed by an unknown assailant’s bullet, Father Mike addresses many of
these factors in an eight-minute eulogy. He focuses purposefully on two issues, a focus signaled by their repetition in the
film. The first is “You cannot murder our children,” and the
second is “We will not allow this self-inflicted genocide to
continue.”25 It is not clear in the film whether or not these
statements are connected for Lee, but with the second statement he implies that the community has the sole power to
end this “self-inflicted genocide,” even as he simultaneously
urges people in this (South Side) community to trust the
Chicago Police Department.
In the middle of his eulogy, Father Mike confronts the
mourners. “How is it that not one witness has come forward?”
Similarly, at the scene of Patty’s murder, when Lysistrata asks
a bystander if she saw the shooter, the woman just looks at her
coldly and walks away. In the same scene, Patty’s mother Irene
(Jennifer Hudson) asks the crowd that has gathered whether
anyone has seen anything.26 This motif is continued throughout the film. Even when Father Mike offers a $5,000 reward
for information, no one is willing to come forward.
Lee’s insistence that the black community on the South
Side of Chicago is responsible for their own ills and the
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
33
killing of their own children is one of the most alienating and
controversial aspects of his film, not only for this writer but
for many in Chicago’s black communities. Further, he implies
it is solely up to the community to fix the problem. Bizarrely,
the film seems to suggest forcefully that an appropriate solution to the problem is to trust the city’s system of policing: if
someone comes forward with information about Patty’s killer
and hands that information to the police, then according to
this logic, the community will somehow be safer.
Even without the backdrop of earlier social-issue films,
this is a problematic view that fails to account for the ways
in which state-sanctioned violence (via the police and other
government agencies) is a fact of life, especially for poor folks
and people of color, throughout the United States and especially in Chicago, enforcing a warped racialized and classbased system of violent punishment. In fact, after the film
wrapped, there was a succession of revelations about the
Chicago Police Department (CPD) and its deployment of
violence. Just days after the film debuted, the city settled a
lawsuit in relation to the Homan Square detention facility,
where thousands of Chicagoans had been unlawfully detained and in some cases tortured.27 A couple of weeks before
that story broke, the CPD had released a video of the brutal
murder of Laquan McDonald which contradicted the established police narrative that several people had worked
tirelessly to keep secret.28 While these controversies
erupted well after the film wrapped, the role of the CPD
in black deaths was well established at the time of shooting, if only Lee had bothered to look.29
Instead, spoiler alert: in the film’s surprise ending,
Chi-Raq reveals that he himself is Patty’s killer. When he
turns himself in to the police, his redemption is accomplished.
Thus Lee seems to be directing communities on the South
Side to put their trust in a police department that has shown
itself to be untrustworthy, in fact dangerous, for decades.30 In
an interview with Chicago magazine, Lee explained: “We as a
people can’t talk only about Black Lives Matter, I Can’t
Breathe, Don’t Shoot, and then not talk about this selfinflicted genocide we’re doing to ourselves. For me, it goes
hand in hand. Only by talking about both and addressing
both can we bring change. Cops ain’t just killing us. We’re
killing ourselves too.”31 Lee’s claim of social responsibility
notwithstanding, the film’s insistence that black communities
trust the police is unfounded. Lee’s point of view stands in
stark contrast to that of social justice activist Mia Mingus,
who has declared emphatically: “The state uses violence to
maintain power and control and therefore does not have
a vested interest in ending violence.”32 The violence
Chi-Raq committed within his own community cannot
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be reconciled, healed, or fixed by the state. The intrusion
of the state inevitably will only make things worse, no
matter what the script says.
While Lee pokes fun at Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the film,
he fails to address the real issues at hand in the community in
anything but a cursory way. His satire is uneven, chastising
the black community again and again for its own travails,
while failing to clarify the connections between the violence
in black communities and the state-sanctioned violence directed against black people. Lee missed an opportunity here
to explore the systems and institutions that have a stake in the
violence—the police, the educational system, businesses that
extract labor (and profit) from these communities without
giving back to them—as he had done so effectively with the
entertainment industry as target in Bamboozled.
He also failed to examine the ways in which the community is working to heal its own wounds. One such example is
explored in the documentary The Interrupters (Steve James,
2011), which observes the work of the organization Cure
Violence (formerly Ceasefire). This film was created in
collaboration with Kartemquin Films, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization known for the production of documentary films and lauded for creating projects that engage the
communities portrayed in their films. This engagement is
true of The Interrupters, a deeply collaborative film (shot over
the course of a year) that follows three violence interrupters
on the South Side of Chicago. Similarly, Dreamcatcher (Kim
Longinotto, 2015) is another documentary film, this time
about the work of Brenda Myers-Powell, a former sex
worker from Chicago who runs a foundation with the same
name as the film. One of the producers of the film, Lisa
Stevens, had had a working relationship with Myers-Powell
for several years before shooting began. These two films,
both documentaries about black activists directed by white
filmmakers, provide a more complete view of the complexities that surround the violence in Chicago than Chi-Raq does,
partly because the filmmakers spent time in Chicago with
people who are doing the work to create the change they
want to see in their communities.
Chi-Raq reveals that Lee is on unstable ground when he
ventures outside his native Brooklyn. And while Father
Pfleger’s voice is a loud one on the South Side, he is hardly the
only person doing work in this area. Lee explains that Father
Pfleger arranged for him to meet with more than a hundred
gang members over the course of a fifteen-hour day. He also
spoke with the organization Purpose Over Pain, a Chicagobased advocacy group created by mothers who have lost children to gun violence.33 But Lee’s perfunctory research, guided
by Father Pfleger, did not yield a view of how committed
Dressed in white, Lysistrata (Paris) and Father Mike (Cusack) confront black-on-black violence.
these communities are to finding solutions. As a result, his
film, except for the inclusion of a Stop the Violence march
(something that is indeed common in the city), fails to reveal
the communities’ engagement with and resistance to this violence. Lee would have been well advised to get to know the
South Side a bit more before he ventured to make a film about
this community.
Early on in Lee’s career, cultural critic Wahneema
Lubiano argued that Lee’s presence as the premiere black
storyteller foreclosed the possibilities of multifarious stories
about black life. At the time, she was frustrated that his
work was celebrated so uncritically, and discussed openly
“the pressure many African-Americans place on any artist to
‘speak’ for the community, a pressure against which countless African American critics have inveighed, but a pressure
to which Lee himself contributes when he claims to have
told the truth.”34 Since the time of that writing, Lee has produced many more films and his work has become far more
subject to criticism. Additionally, the landscape of images
produced by black male and female filmmakers and photographers has become much richer.
Despite Lee’s claims to use his films, and Chi-Raq especially, as a vehicle to “tell it like it is,” I find myself today asking the same questions that Lubiano posed in 1991.35 Lee’s
attempt at truth-telling via Chi-Raq is, to parse Lubiano, the
truth compared to what? Lee is not really doing anything to
advance the conversation, for representations of black people
in Chicago are almost always reduced to this picture of
violence and savagery. With all of his authorial credibility as
a teller of black stories, Lee has reproduced this same
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
35
3.
4.
Even in scenes set inside the National Armory, Lee’s satire
misses a valuable opportunity to address state violence
against black Americans.
hackneyed image, and even if it’s done satirically and to
provoke discussion, it’s not clear what Chi-Raq or its title
character can offer to a larger discourse beyond a rehashing
of the same racist tropes.
Lee missed a valuable opportunity to explore the nuances
that produce violence within black communities. Chi-Raq
blames black Chicagoans for their own circumstances without engaging the many institutions at the root of the problem.
There are many areas where he could have better turned his
attention, especially when Chicago’s public schools are constantly in flux, public housing has disappeared with no real
plan for its return, unemployment in black communities
remains above twenty percent, the mayor and the police department have a well-documented and notorious history of
corruption, and black men and women are killed by the
police at an alarming rate.36 Commenting on getting to
know Chicago, Lee stated, “You have to come in with an
open mind . . . you can’t come in thinking I know more shit
than you, and you motherfuckers are stupid.”37 The film suggests that Lee did not come in with an open mind. His lack of
any significant engagement with the community and his erroneous beliefs about black-on-black violence blinded him to
the real story behind his story. There is too much heartache in
my city. Unfortunately, Chi-Raq fails to grapple with it.
Notes
1. Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading
Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze,
Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” Black
American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 253–82.
2. These numbers appear in a congressional report published in
August 2015 and refer only to casualties among U.S. citizens.
See Hannah Fischer, “A Guide to U.S. Military Casualty
Statistics: Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, Operation Inherent
Resolve, Operation New Dawn, Operation Iraqi Freedom,
and Operation Enduring Freedom,” Congressional Research
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
Service, August 7, 2015, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22452.
pdf. However, these statistics do not account for civilians
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Chuck Goudie, “Despite
‘Chiraq’ Label, Data Show Chicago Not Even Close to Iraq,”
ABC7 Chicago, July 27, 2015, http://abc7chicago.com/886958/
David Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence: Discourse,
Space and Representation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2005), 4.
Ironically, King Louie (aka Louis Johnson aka King L)
would later be shot himself and nearly killed after the film
was released, on the day before Christmas 2015, in an act of
violence very much like those he had described.
Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, “War of Words: Chiraq Should
Die, Some Rappers and Activists Say,” Chicago Sun-Times,
June 1, 2014.
Ibid.
Fran Spielman, “Pfleger Lectures City Council during
‘Chiraq’ Debate,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 25, 2015.
Ibid.
David Sterritt, Spike Lee’s America, 1st edition (Cambridge:
Polity, 2013), 8.
Ibid.
Luvena Kopp, “Symbolic Violence and Subversion in Spike
Lee’s Bamboozled,” in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil
Rights, ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 2014), 216.
Derek Conrad Murray, “Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African American Satire,” in Post-Soul Satire: Black
Identity after Civil Rights, ed. Derek C. Maus and James J.
Donahue (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014), 9.
David Stuttard, Looking at Lysistrata (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010). This volume contains Stuttard’s own adaptation, which he claims is a looser version that attempts to stay
true to Aristophanes’s intention. It was also adapted all over
the world in 2003 in response to the impending Iraq War.
Ibid.
Martin Revermann, “On Misunderstanding the Lysistrata,
Productively,” in Looking at Lysistrata (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010), 73.
Ibid., 75.
Lee, Chi-Raq.
Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence, 4.
Ibid., 131.
Herman Gray, “Culture, Masculinity, and the Time after
Race,” in Toward a Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 88.
Ibid.
Sprite mixed with codeine is often referred to as “lean” or
“dirty Sprite” in numerous songs and in Chi-Raq itself.
Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence.
Cusack is a Chicago native.
Lee, Chi-Raq.
Jennifer Hudson is also a Chicago native. She has lost several
family members to gun violence. See “Jennifer Hudson Opens
Up about Her Family’s Murders,” ABC News, October 8,
2015, http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/jennifer-hudsonopens-familys-murders/story?id=34309912
27. Brandon Patterson, “Chicago’s ‘Black Site’ Police Scandal
Is About to Explode Again,” Mother Jones, December 8,
2015, www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/rahm-emanuelchicago-police-homan-square-scandal
28. Brandon Patterson, “10 Things You Should Know about the
Killing of Laquan McDonald by Police,” Mother Jones,
December 1, 2015, www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/
laquan-mcdonald-chicago-police-shooting-video-explainer
29. Craig B. Futterman, H. Melissa Mather, and Melanie Miles,
“The Use of Statistical Evidence to Address Police Supervisory and Disciplinary Practices: The Chicago Police Department’s Broken System,” DePaul Journal for Social Justice 1,
no. 2 (2008): 251.
30. Monica Einhorn, “Settlement for Torture of 4 Men by
Police,” New York Times, December 8, 2007.
31. Bryan Smith, “I Said, ‘Mayor, Your Honor, You’re Gonna Be
on the Wrong Side of History’,” Chicago Magazine, December
2015, 99.
32. Mia Mingus, “Still Choosing to Leap: Building Alternatives,”
Leaving Evidence, March 31, 2015, https://leavingevidence.
wordpress.com/2015/03/31/still-choosing-to-leap-buildingalternatives/; From “Remarks from the closing plenary,
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
‘Revolutionary Organizing across Time and Space’,” at the
INCITE! Color of Violence 4 Conference, March 26–29,
2015, Chicago, Illinois.”
Smith, “I Said, ‘Mayor, Your Honor, . . .’.”
Lubiano, “But Compared to What?” 255.
Ibid., 263.
See “Chicago Makes It Official, With 54 Schools to Be
Closed,” New York Times, March 22, 2013, sec. A; Gail Marks
Jarvis, “Nearly Half of Chicago Residents Can’t Afford
Where They Live, Study Says,” Chicago Tribune, June 16,
2016, www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-macarthur-foun
dation-housing-crisis-worries-0616-biz-20160615-story.html;
Adeshina Emmanuel, “Chicago’s Black Unemployment Rate
Higher than Other Large Metro Areas,” Chicago Reporter,
http://chicagoreporter.com/chicagos-black-unemploymentrate-higher-other-large-metro-areas/; Willie F. Tolliver et al.,
“Police Killings of Unarmed Black People: Centering Race
and Racism in Human Behavior and the Social Environment Content,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social
Environment 26, nos. 3–4 (2016): 279–86.
Smith, “I Said, ‘Mayor, Your Honor, . . .’.”
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