Portside

Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

Each term my film students watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works. Most students of color feel Lee’s character did the right thing while the majority of white students cannot understand why Mookie would do such a thing to his boss. Why this reaction—term after term, year after year?