Here’s a novel idea for Spike Lee, and even for Mayor Rahm Emanuel: instead of urging black women to withhold sex to stem violence in their communities, maybe we’d all be better off if elected officials of color (and their allies) stonewalled the City Council and state legislature until the disproportionately white, rich, and powerful enact policy changes that help curb police brutality and engender greater economic opportunities for at-risk populations in Chicago and the state of Illinois.
Emanuel’s grievances, however, didn’t zero in on whether or not Lee’s work would accurately depict long-standing maladies for black Chicagoans. He wasn’t interested in how the film could potentially attract much-needed national attention to the plight of black Americans living in Chicago; nor did he take care to exercise diplomacy and provide Lee with the resources necessary to take on the issue effectively, so as to encourage the media and entertainment industry to bring their projects—and jobs—to an otherwise depleted local economy. (In fact, it was allegedly quite the opposite, with rumblings about attempts to block tax incentives normally granted to large film-production projects.)
Yet Lee takes the old-school respectability route in his press junkets, further pushing the “black-on-black” narrative that’s become a derailing folly for the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, even though most violent crimes happen between members of the same racial groups—including white people.
We don’t need black women to withhold sex for the problems to subside. We need filmmakers like Lee, and officials like Emanuel and Governor Bruce Rauner, to closely examine racist and classist political systems, and avoid conflating widespread policy failures with a so-called lack of personal responsibility in black communities.
