Watching Spike Lee’s latest film Chi-Raq is akin to jumping into a huge vat of ice water: It’s bracing — to say the very least.
Lee, a dedicated social commentator and critic, has long used the medium of film to point out our societal ills and evils, and his most recent work is no different. He tackles the subject of black-on-black killings, a phenomenon that should more accurately be labeled “thug-on-thug” killings, thusly avoiding the conservative’s trap of denigrating an entire race by the actions of a dysfunctional few.
While the film is set in Chicago, as one of the characters points out, it could have been set in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore or any number of other cities with large populations of lost urban youth of color.
Reaching back in history, Lee summons up the ghost of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the tale of an ancient Greek heroine who leads women on an anti-war sex strike. The actors in Lee’s tale often speak in rhyme, reminiscent of Shakespearean characters. The combination of these two throwbacks no doubt renders the film beyond the ken of many of today’s younger viewers, in spite of the hip-hop overtones pulsating throughout.
The notion that since man comes kicking and screaming out of an orifice between piss and shit into this world, women can control him using that same orifice makes sense. Indeed, more than one writer — myself included — has posited that if society is offended by misogynistic rap videos, the surest way to put an end to them is by teaching our daughters to refuse to shake their booties on camera.
While Lee touches on virtually all of the factors contributing to the self-inflicted genocide we are witnessing in poor communities of color — historic racism in employment, long-term disinvestments in education, our willingness to spend billions upon billions of dollars to rebuild countries we tore apart simply to keep gasoline under two dollars a gallon while ignoring pressing problems at home — he only briefly touches on real solutions, other than the premise of the film: Withholding sex to bring about a cessation of the violence.
Empowering women to preserve life by enforcing a policy of “No peace, no pussy” is a novel idea, if only it could work. But it alone can’t.
What has to be factored in is male’s, particularly young alpha-males’, propensity to prove themselves, and to do so by engaging in risky, downright dangerous behavior. Much of the violence we see is due to this testosterone-driven aspect of the human condition. That’s why war is still so popular.
Young men from economically advantaged backgrounds can sublimate these impulses via a variety of means: Skydiving, snowboarding, bungee jumping and a host of other ways to test their mettle. Inner-city black youth get the same excitement, the same rush, by dodging bullets.
So, until we come up with some way of channeling this energy into constructive outlets (or at least outlets where no innocent bystanders will be gunned down by a stray bullet), the only result of women withholding sex from me will be the creation of more rapists.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.