Chiraq ain't Chicago

Spike Lee's new movie is NOT about Chicago.  'Chiraq' is a metaphor for senseless violence and the desperation of the public to stop it.  Chiraq is also Hollywood entertainment and if success is measured in dollars, it's a likely loser.

Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, the model for this movie, as one of a series of plays about the futility of the Peloponnesian wars.  Those wars devastated and exhausted Athens and Sparta between 431-404 BC.   Lee's comparison of the war-weary Athenian public to inner city African Americans works on a general level.

The message of both Aristophanes and Lee is the same: most wars are about power and masculine pride.  The true cost of such wars are measured in the lives of innocents. These wars can get out of control and the movie is a plea for peace. 

Okay, I buy that. And I liked the idea that a mass movement — in this case of women — is the way to force the warriors to put down their arms. This is also my argument in The In$ane Chicago Way, A World of Gangs, and People & Folks, my books on gangs. 

But there are many problems in the movie that alienated me.  First, as with Aristophanes, the characters in Chiraq are reduced to stereotypes, even cartoons. The gang leaders, for example, have no depth and seem only concerned with sex until Chiraq (the gang leader) is overwhelmed at the end of the movie with images of victims and repents.  The women are nearly all one-dimensional as well,  crude stereotypes of sex-obsessed black women wearing alluring attire. Such shallowness may have been all right in the Athenian theater, but we should expect more in a two-hour movie. What the shorthand of this movie does is reinforce racial stereotypes, not undermine them. 

Second, Lee's location of the movie prompts us to look for insights into Chicago's gangland. Don't. In the very first scenes of the movie,  comparing the deaths in Chicago in 2000-2015 to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the movie veers away from reality.  The years since 2004 have marked the lowest level of homicide in Chicago since 1967. The violent years — the organized gang wars — were in the years 1989-1999 when Chicago's homicide rate was twice as high as now. Lee's nostalgic references to "back in the day when children weren't shot" forget the gang ordered murder of 11-year-old Yummy Sandifer in 1994, who was featured on the cover of Time and memorialized by Tupac.  We forget how much worse violence was during the gang wars. Once again, Lee reinforces media stereotypes. 

The climax of the movie is the signing of a peace treaty between gang leaders and with the mayor and police chief.  That's not happening today, even if women withhold sex.  There are no Chicago African American gang leaders anymore with the authority to negotiate any broader truce.  Young people don't know their laws and prayers but instead memorize sexist and violent "drill-style rap" lyrics. Today's gang-bangers are not directed from above, but are stimulated to violence by local incidents,  neighborhood feuds, episodic humiliations, petty drug deals, and social media provocations.  An early scene in the movie where a rapper is shot in a concert with provocative rap lyrics tweeted in text on the screen is intended to recall the 2012 Chief Keefe and Li'l Jo Jo beef.  But gang homicide today has dropped dramatically from the 1990s,  not getting worse as Chiraq would have us believe.

The hard reality masked by Lee's stereotypes is that no gang leaders or magic bullets can stop the kind of spontaneous gang violence we are witnessing today. The gang peace conference in 1999 described in In$ane ended in the assassination of a gang leader by his own gang homies as he tried to negotiate peace. The futile tactics of the Chicago Police and CureViolence to threaten or cajole gang leaders don't work because gang leaders aren't in control of any armies.  Rep. Bobby Rush's trip to the federal prison in Florence, Colorado  to meet with Jeff Fort and Larry Hoover was 20 years too late and out of touch with reality. The 1990s gang wars ended for many reasons spelled out in my book. But the principle outcome was the undermining of established gang leaders and fracturing of African American gangs. 

Don't forget I said Lee's movie was NOT about Chicago. But that made one aspect of the movie maddening. One of the lead characters in Chiraq,  who contextualizes the violence and leads the protest march is a white priest played by John Cusack.  He is supposed to represent the real-life Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabinas parish. In a Spike Lee movie, bewilderingly, a white person is the moral leader.  There are many views of Pfleger, but why are there no serious African American community leaders in the movie who talk to gang youth and work for peace?  Why didn't Spike Lee feature Minister Farrakhan or the active NOI gang outreach of Minister Michael D Muhammed?  If the movie is only loosely tied to present day Chicago, why feature a white priest?

I think this is the Hollywood angle of the movie. Chiraq seeks to be a cross-over and such movies need white heroes. I'm not sure it's going to work. My wife and I went to the movie at prime time in an upscale theater near our home.  There were only about two dozen people in the audience and we were the only whites.  What message did placing a white priest as the voice of reason and empathy send?  In Chicago's ghetto,  as well as in other cities,  it is African American community leaders who do the lion's share of the work for peace.   Shame on you, Spike Lee.

I was also unsatisfied with the film's minimizing of the impact of police violence. The movie invoked BlackLivesMatter with a familiar list of names of victims.  The idea that police violence, like the horrific police execution of Laquan McDonald,  has played a major role in stoking the hostility of black youth is totally absent.  As I said in the last line of In$ane, "In Chicago and elsewhere, history shows the gang problem is broader than just a problem of gang members."   This movie lets the cops off the hook.

Spike Lee's movie is about stereotypes. Unfortunately, instead of undermining them, he promotes them. 

Trumping the Gang Problem

Donald Trump has a solution for this country’s gang problem. He says strong leaders, like himself or certain police chiefs,  could solve our country’s gang problem if only their hands were untied. Here are some of his thoughts on gangs:  

“We’re going to get rid of those gang members so fast your head will spin”…..“One of the first things I’m going to do is get rid of those gang members”….. Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy “is a phenomenal guy.  He could stop this if we allowed him to stop it. … Believe me.”

Well I don’t believe him one bit. When McCarthy became the CPD police chief, he vowed to “eradicate” the Maniac Latin Disciples. Even his own officers made fun of him on that one.   I’ve been doing research and working with gangs for more than thirty years. Gangs aren’t going away no matter what we do.  With high levels of poverty, inequality, and racism,  gangs are now a permanent fixture in American’s urban landscape. 

I’ve concluded a bigger problem than gangs is our poisonous culture of demonization.  Trump exemplifies this demonization, but he is far from alone. Any trip to a courtroom where a gang member is on trial will reveal even more outrageous comments from prosecutors. For example, in one Georgia court where two gang members were on trial, the prosecutor told the jury that the name of the gang, “Folks” stood for “Followers of Our Lord King Satan.” Let’s see: young, black, male, gang members, accused of murder and being devil worshippers to boot! It didn’t take long for the all white jury to come back with the death penalty. 

I wasn’t in the courtroom for the trial, but years later I was called in on a habeas corpus hearing on the basis that the defendants had received ineffective counsel. I brought along a letter from a former Chicago gang squad officer saying how ridiculous the prosecution's “Folks” assertion was.  The death penalty still hovers over these two young men as the courts weigh the fate of the habeas petition. But demonization is standard fare for prosecuting gangs.

Rather than seeing the gang problem as having complex structural, cultural, and situational roots, gangs are essentialized by the media, politicians, police, and prosecutors as little more than evil cartoon characters.  And if gangs are evil, Trump’s final solution might be similar to Kurtz's in Conrad’s  Heart of Darkness:  “Exterminate All the Brutes.”  You can’t reform evil so why try? Destroy that which you fear! Deport! Incarcerate!  Annihilate!  Let’s not take time to think, let's stamp them out — now!

Life is not so simple and never was.  In my new book, The In$ane Chicago Way,  I look at the darkest side of Chicago gangs, their horrific wars, ties to organized crime, and widespread corruption of police.  In my other books I was focused on debunking gang stereotypes, but in this one I narrate the story of gang leaders bent head over heels on grabbing power and money.  I describe police who became drug kingpins in an unholy alliance with those gang chiefs.  But my message in In$ane is familiar: “Gangs are not one thing.” We need to think first and then react. 

The gang leaders who rushed to war in the 1990s number at most in the dozens and are mainly out of the picture now. Professional hitmen exist but it is hard to be a hitman and most don't last long.  The current fracturing of gangs in Chicago in part is a healthy rebellion of young gang members who were sent to kill, die, or spend their lives in jail by power tripping “OGs.”  We have a unique opportunity now to win youth away from gang life and enlist them in the struggle for social change. The #BlackLivesMatter movement represents the most exciting possibility in generations for a social movement that includes the streets. We should all join in.

But the 2016 elections are a dangerous time for demonization.  Trump has realized “law and order” has been a winning policy for US voters at least since Nixon.  Mass incarceration, stepped up deportations, and wars against gangs and drugs have defined both Republican and Democratic administrations for almost 50 years.  Dare I suggest we have failed to learn the lessons of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini? Have we forgotten the KKK and their terrorist lynchings? Do we still remember the names of Emmett Till, Michael Brown, and Milwaukee's Dontre Hamilton?  Have we forgotten where unrestrained scapegoating can lead?

Ferguson, Social Movements, and Gangs

I went to Ferguson for the one year commemoration of the murder of Michael Brown. I accompanied my wife and Maria Hamilton, whose son was killed by Milwaukee police last April.  I came away deeply moved by the dynamism of the young activists. It was clear to me that #BlackLivesMatter is spearheading a new black liberation movement that just might have the potential to transform society and reach alienated youth.

We were in Ferguson for the marches, the shootings Sunday night, and the civil disobedience Monday. We supported those who were arrested at the Department of Justice and trained for confrontation but fortunately were not among those jailed.  The crowd was exuberant,

At the Canfield Green Apartments where Michael Brown  was 

shot by police and laid for 4 and a half hours in the street after

 he was shot. 

chanting “We’ve Already Won” at the lines of armed cops.  One young girl was wearing a T-shirt that summed it up: “This Ain’t your Momma’s Civil Rights Movement.”

No indeed. This new movement is decentralized,  organized yet not organized, and its youthful activists exhibit courage, street smarts, and dedication. They don’t take orders from anyone. This new, dynamic set of comrades rely on social media to mobilize and educate, and won’t let the constant police provocations hold them back.  Police murders are the essence of dehumanization and Michael Brown’s death has sent Ferguson into a state of rebellion.  Young people are screaming, “Enough is Enough.”  This is an American Intifada and I’m on their side.

But the events in Ferguson are not one thing. I was not foolish enough to think in a few days I could learn anything about the gangs and the extent of their participation in the uprising. Lots of people claim they know, but there is no serious research. We heard that gang members in Ferguson pledged at one time to put down arms against one another and unite against police. So did Baltimore gangs, who publicly denounced lies that they were planning to shoot police and called for calm. In Seattle the gangs marched together. #BlackLivesMatter seems to be reaching the most alienated.

If there is hope to stem gang violence, I don’t think it lies in formal programs like CureViolence or law enforcement schemes to threaten leaders, or even less in the failed strategy of mass incarceration.  As I have been writing from People & Folks to A World of Gangs to The In$ane Chicago Way, the real hope for us is to pull gang members into social movements —  like those in Ferguson.  Gangs are by nature made up of desperate, angry young men and women. I’m sure they are among the those on Florissant Street confronting the police. These youth are setting the fire this time for all of us.

It’s not clear how the gun play started Sunday night. Some claimed two groups of youth were shooting at one another. Just because there is a movement for justice does not mean the internalized anger of black youth will be easily channelled into activism.  The movement may offer hope, but it doesn’t promise as many jobs as the dope game.  As it stands, our movement can’t even get more than a few killer police indicted, much less punished for murder. This won’t make gang kids’ anger go away but instead will heat it up.

In The In$ane Chicago Way I looked at how Latino gangs with their superior connections to Mexican cartels built a Spanish mafia in Chicago.  Black gang members, already at the bottom of conventional society are also at the bottom of the drug game. In Chicago their old hierarchical “street organizations” have shattered. Like the movement in Ferguson, black gangs are decentralized and their youthful members look to social media not self proclaimed leaders for inspiration. 

What Ferguson taught me was the vital importance of reaching out now to black youth on the streets. The In$ane Chicago Way argues that organized crime is a serious threat to our youth. However the lack of legitimacy of the old gang leaders means street youth are looking for something new and events in Ferguson show us the way.  We need to realize #BlackLivesMatter means gang members too.  The alternative to joining this powerful social movement is watching our youth succumb to an even deeper cycle of despair and destructiveness.  Ferguson is above all a call to action.