On Sunday, I awoke to the news that some parents of Walter Payton Prep High School students refused to allow their children to play a night game on the campus of Gwendolyn Brooks Prep High. 

You have to live in Chicago to fully appreciate this drama.  Payton and Brooks are both selective enrollment public high schools in the city. Both are considered “good” schools. Payton is on the Northside of Chicago while Brooks is located on the Southside. Rich white parents use their clout to get their children admitted to Payton but not to Brooks. In case you didn’t know, Chicago is still the most segregated city in the United States. This also extends to our schools, of course.

One can hardly blame the parents of Payton students who were afraid that their children might succumb to violence on the dreaded “Southside.” Over the past three to four years, media accounts have portrayed Chicago as the wild, wild, West. Scarcely a day goes by that there isn’t another account of rampant “senseless” violence in the city.

It’s gotten so bad that the former police superintendent, Jody Weis, felt the need to proclaim during a news conference in 2010: “We are not Chi-raq. We are Chicago.”
This brings me to the main issue that I wanted to address today.

About four years ago, I began to hear Chicago referred to as “Chiraq” by some of the young people with whom I work. It seems to have started as a way to characterize what they felt was rampant and perhaps even indiscriminate violence. In the last couple of years, “Chiraq” seems to have migrated from youth lexicon into general popular culture. A number of people have expressed consternation at the city’s new nickname. They worry that it glamorizes violence.  For example, blogger Randall Irwin recently lamented:

“We were happy to be called “The Chi” (yet we still had that gangster reputation). We were proud of our style, the way we dressed, the way we danced, our neighborhoods our food and our music. Not how dangerous it was to walk the streets. But it seems nowadays being the murder capital is a badge of honor. What happened, how did it come to this?”

On the Zakiya Sankofa blog, Amber Jones pleaded with Chicagoans to abandon the use of the term “Chiraq” in describing the city:

“Speaking from the vantage point of a Chicagoan, “Chiraq” in its glamorized form needs to be rejected within our nation. In the beginning, it was a powerful tool to stir emotion and extract concern from the nation regarding the atrocious amount of murders in Chicago in recent years, but now it has become a term that people outside of Chicago jokingly throw around as well as a term that people from Chicago have tried to reclaim and boast shamelessly about regarding their own love for Chicago. This is just one symptom of the sickness of territorial empathy plaguing Black America. Outside of the deaths of youth that we conceptualize as tragic because of their life prospect (which I dig into later), often we neglect to empathize on a national level, stepping back like it is not our issue if we do not have a personal connection. For those within these cities and communities, the lack of strong, continual support from our own people has caused people to fight this issue on their own or just accept it as normal (cue the “I <3 Chiraq” T-shirts). This vicious cycle is getting us nowhere, and if we do not begin to band together as one movement pressed to save our communities, I do not even want to fathom our future.”

Because I spend most of my time thinking about criminalization and “violence” in Chicago, I have considered the various meanings of the term “Chiraq” since I started hearing it a few years ago.  Most recently, some have even begun to refer to Chicago as Chiran or Chiganistan.  These terms are beyond problematic and I think need further explication. Over the next few weeks, I will be unpacking the meanings of “Chiraq” for various constituencies. It is part of a larger project that I will share more about in the coming weeks.

Today, I begin by discussing “Chiraq” as a “badge of honor” and as a commercial enterprise in our capitalist economy.

For many, “Chiraq” was popularized by Chief Keef who I’ve briefly written about in the past. Keef has repeatedly used Chiraq in his lyrics. An example is Bo Deal’s song “Murda” featuring Keef where he raps in the third verse: “My young niggas wilding in Chiraq catching bodies.” In another song featuring Keef called “Traffic” by his protégé Lil’ Reese, Chicago is repeatedly referred to as Chiraq. 

There are countless other examples such as “Russian Roulette” among other songs. Each of the songs that I referenced deals with violence in some fashion.

Keef exists at the intersection of the prison industrial complex and the commercial rap business.  On the one hand, he’s spent many days behind bars as a juvenile and is rumored to have gang ties. On the other hand, he has emerged from the local Chicago underground hip hop scene to become a commercially successful rapper. His persona now sells records. He is understandably capitalizing on this. Yet the membrane between his two worlds is porous because a simple promotional interview at a gun range violated the terms of his probation and sent him back to jail earlier this year.

As Keef moved from the “invisible” underground hip hop community in Chicago into the broader more “visible” national commercial rap business, Chiraq as a term also migrated. Below is an image of Keef’s protégé Lil Reese promoting his album; it’s impossible to miss the military theme. Reese poses as a “soldier” in a “war” on Chicago’s streets.

As Reese and Keef boast about the number of guns they’ve fired, the people whose lives they’ve “taken” & the amount of drugs they ingest, they wear the fact that they’ve survived the “mean” streets of Chicago (so far) as a badge of honor. This connotes their toughness and fearlessness. In the face of “war” and violence, they stand strong, ready to take on all comers. Some see these boasts simply as a celebration of violence; I view them primarily as elegies of survival. A Facebook friend recently asked why we don’t consider young gang members in Chicago as child soldiers rather than as terrorists. Understood in this context, Keef’s impotent boasts take on the characteristic of a plaintive mourning song. Rather than fear him and his crew, we are left with profound sadness instead. After all, what chance would Keef have against the American military or the security state? We know the answer…

One thing is certain: Keef is an unrepentant American capitalist. He wants to make as much money as he possibly can and will portray whatever image will help him to achieve his goal. In this particular way, he is really no different than Donald Trump or the myriad other captains of industry in this country. Unfortunately for Keef, he was born poor and black. This matters as his identity was already inscribed as criminal at birth and he had no buffer against the oppressive forces that would bear down on him. As a 17 year old teenager, Keef can rightly claim as Tupac did years before him: “don’t blame me I was given this world I didn’t make it.” Keef is more commodity/merchandise in the capitalist system than mogul. He is more pawn than powerful.

The irony of “Chiraq” for young men like Keef (pre-fame) is that by describing their communities as war zones (which may or may not be an apt description), it inadvertently legitimates a draconian military response from the state (though the state needs no excuse to crackdown on the marginalized). I will focus more specifically on this particular argument in my next post about the meanings of Chiraq. More to come…