Spike Lee: Rahm Emanuel Tried to Bully Me Into Not Making 'Chi-Raq'

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33118-focus-spike-lee-rahm-emanuel-tried-to-bully-me-into-not-making-chi-raq

What was the mayor’s gripe?

That it’s gonna give Chicago a bad image. We started shooting Chi-Raq June 1. We finished July 9. During that time, 331 people got wounded, 65 murdered. New York City has three times the population of Chicago; Chicago has more homicides than New York City. Last week, The Daily Beast had a front-page story saying that Chicago is the No. 1 city in America for mass murders [actually, for mass shootings, defined as three or more people shot in a single incident]. Chicago is the poster boy [for violence]. I’m not making this stuff up. So what’s there to argue then?

His whole thing was, the title is going to hurt tourism, the title is going to hurt economic development. But what tourism is he talking about? While we were shooting the film, you had the NFL draft here. Quarter million people in Grant Park. Can’t get a hotel room, can’t get a reservation. I mean, it’s packed. Then the Grateful Dead. Then Lollapalooza. So this part of the city is booming. But there are no bulletproof double-decker buses going through the Wild Hundreds [the gang-infested area from 100th to 130th Streets] or through Terror Town [a two-by-four-block patch of South Shore]. What economic development is going on in the South Side?

The mayor is a well-educated man. He and my wife both went to Sarah Lawrence. So I know he read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It is a fact that Chicago is the most segregated big city in America. That’s not Spike Lee saying that. That’s a fact.

[KeepItReal]

1. K&R

I’ve never tried to present myself as a motherfucking spokesperson for 45 million black folks. This is my opinion: 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 self-inflicted 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.

Well said Mr. Lee.

I hope this effort has a wider distribution than just Amazon.com

[nashville_brook]

4. i've bit my tongue when my conservative friend on FB (yeah i have one)

uses the "black on black" crime argument to counter every single photo of BLM i post. i cut him slack b/c he's from a family of NY cops and he see thru a different lens entirely.

so, seeing spike lee use the same argument...or maybe he's just addressing the fact here...it makes me wonder if this isn't a place where there's room to negotiate. no one wants to live in unsafe neighborhoods. i've lived in unsafe neighborhoods and it's no fun. nothing like the southside of chicago, but the fact is that the people who are the most invested in ridding the area of crime are the people who live there.

what lee is describing here is a cycle. there's too much inequality which leads to people finding ways to support themselves thru crime which results in the insane murder rates -- rinse repeat. a true fix addresses the economic foundation as well as the corrupt police reaction (which is also a symptom of the same economic disparity).

i wonder if my conservative friend would go along with me that far? he might.

[mmonk]

2. Rahm is the poster boy for telling people to sit down and shut up.

[Betty Karlson]

5. And has been ever since he called the Democratic left "f*cking retards". n/t

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

3. Maybe Mayor DoucheNozzle should stop appointing his cronies to steal

money from our schools. Maybe some of these kids might at least have half a chance. Oh but thankfully the "grown up" got elected last time. At least that's what our right wing democrats like to imply.

[Ace Rothstein]

6. The name of the film is cringe inducing.

Nobody from Chicago actually refers to Chicago as Chiraq.

[KeepItReal]

7. Chi-raq is a very specific reference.

And it has nothing to do with the economically prosperous, relatively safe majority of Chicago.

[Rex]

8. Like I care what Rahm thinks, he can eat shit.

A horrible person. It is disgusting that he is a Dem. Crooked from the ground up. You know another difference from NYC? Chitown had it's own black ops dungeon for cops to take subjects off the books and torture them. As far as we know the NYPD does not have one.

But yeah Rahm...worried about bullshit and not the real issue. How did this guy end up on our side?