Chi-raq was an interesting and fun film to watch, if you understand critical theories on race (and the fabric of African American and black history in America) and gender (and the matrix in which women exist and are seen as). If not, you run the risk of interpreting jokes and superficially described issues and solutions as fact for the black community. As a woman of color, a woman with black ancestry, and a woman who grew up around violence that plagued these specific communities I thought it was a different way of viewing the problems. It took a contemporary approach to the long drawn out issues that people of color have been fighting, in multi-dimensional ways, to alleviate.

The role that woman played in the film, was to say the least, offensive for me. I enjoyed watching the film, if I voided my mind of the other social contexts and their implications for the “No Peace, No Pussy” movement. Due to the fact that Spike Lee is a man, and perhaps can be blinded by his privilege as a man, there were several poignant points that lead to the simplification woman and their potential role in the alleviation of crime.

According to the film, all women (particularly women of color) can do to alleviate crime and bring peace to a community is to stop having sex. It also placed a lot of the blame on the community and it’s problems on conception and sex. Black bodies are allowed sex and all its pleasure without being tied to poverty and policies that have placed blacks and other minority groups in the very ecology that cause crimes. Women, particularly black women, have been historically at the forefront of giant civil rights issues. Much of the valid and valuable work that black women do has nothing (and should have nothing) to do with them abstaining from sex.

Sex, or the lack thereof, has nothing to do with the problems that plague many black communities, particularly the one portrayed in Chi-raq – policies, inequities, racism, lack of opportunity, and other structural issues are the problem. Not women. Women deserve sex just as much as the men (or women) they sleep with. Women are more than sexual objects and can offer communities more than just sex and wombs to hold children in. Women are complex beings that suffer complex issues within the ecology of underprivileged neighborhoods. They are not excluded from the violence that is experienced in these neighborhoods, nor is the only burden they hold their lost children.

The over simplification of women, disability, death, and complex social, political, and economic issues was simply distasteful – a film that can only be enjoyed by forgetting about social contexts and the fabric they are embedded in. The film must be viewed in a vacuum to be enjoyable, otherwise, it lacks the dimensionality to properly portray a people and the issues that have been ignored for centuries.