AJPH BOOK & MEDIA

On Golden Vaginas and Gun Violence

CHI-RAQ
A lm directed by Spike Lee

In Spike Lees lm Chi-Raq, he

riffs on the Greek play Lysistrata,
the satire written by Aristophanes
in which Greek women bring
about an end to the Peloponnesian
War through a sex strike. By
seemingly empowering Black
women to stop the gang war on
the streets of Chicago, Illinois, by
withholding sex, Lee attempts to
show, through satire, the complexities of racism, class warfare,
and self-determination among
African Americans. A young girl is
accidently killed by a stray bullet
and Black women declare that
they have had enough. Their
voices unite in a chant: No Peace!
No Pussy! Apparently, when it
comes to social change, our bodies
are all we have to offer.
Ijeoma Oluo, a Black woman
and lm critic, puts it more
harshly: Women are reduced to
walking vaginas1 in Chi-Raq.
Using her own brand of satire, she
writes: Did you know that in

1898

Media Review

Blount

inner cities, black men are just

walking around shooting each
other all day, and black women
are walking around in hot pants
just waiting for the men to put
down their guns for ve minutes
in order to sex them with their
esh-guns? She adds: No, they
dont change the world with their
intellect or their work, they
change the world by refusing
access to their golden vaginas.
Oluo then hints at one of the
lms major failures: In Chi-Raq,
denying a man sex is like denying
him water or airan extreme
cruelty that makes men justiably
desperate. In a world where Black
women are more susceptible to
domestic and sexual violence, this
is a dangerous and tired trope.1
In the male-dominated world
that Lee portraysand attempts,
weakly, to critiquewhat would
actually happen to Black women
who embark on a sex strike? The
same thing that happens to them
now, with no sex strike in effect,
answers Black male cultural critic
Mychal Denzel Smith.2 Rape,
sexual assault, and beatings are all
results of the hypermasculine
culture Lee is critiquing.
This is a major problem
with Lees Chi-Raq, and these
insightful African American
critics, among others, have articulated these criticisms in effective, often eloquent, ways. For
me, as an advocate for Black
womens wellnessand as
someone who sees gun violence
as a public health issuethe lm
provokes other concerns as well.
The fact is that while gun
violence is a terrible scourge on

Black and Brown communities,

most gun-related deaths nationwide are not a result of gang
warfare. Gun-related homicides
have decreased nearly 50% since
1993 according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
Web-based Injury Statistics
Query and Reporting System
(WISQARS). Gang violence
rightly received a lot of attention
during the crack epidemic of the
1980s and 1990s. But, in the mid
1990s, an improving economy
made job prospects better and
lessened the demand for drugs.
This, coupled with the broad
application of aggressive policing
and the three-strikes rule, which
incarcerated up to 30% of Black
men, signicantly reduced gun
violence.3
Despite this progress, Black
men and women are disproportionately affected by gun-related
homicides. According to CDC
data in 2010, 55% of homicide
victims are Black, although they
make up 13% of the population.
The housing market crash of
2007, along with disappearing
living-wage jobs, left Black men
and women already living on the
brink with few options. In men,
we see this expressed as hopelessness, alcohol and substance
abuse, suicide, and rage. Women

are often on the receiving end

of this rage.
According to 19762005
Trends in Intimate Homicides,
men kill each other and men kill
womenespecially the ones they
know. Black women make up
22% of homicides among women,
and most (94%) knew their killers.
In its 2012 report on domestic
violence, the Violence Policy
Center found 64% of Black victims who knew their attackers
were wives, ex-wives, or girlfriends of the offenders. The report also showed the number of
Black women shot and killed by
their husband or intimate partner
was nearly ve times as high as
the total number murdered by
strangers using all weapons combined. Of all the women killed by
intimate partners between 2001
and 2012, 55% were killed with
guns.4 Men who have had
restraining orders for domestic
violence issued against them are
rarely forced to surrender their
weapons, however.
We at the Black Womens
Health Imperative are often asked
two questions: Why dont they
just leave? Why would a woman
subject herself to repeated violence and risk her life? The answer is: it can often be riskier to
leave. Violent partners threaten to
kill women if they leave, kill their
families, and kill their children.
Few women want to risk that.
Also, women with few resources
would have extreme difculty

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Goler Blount is President and CEO of the Black Womens Health Imperative, Washington, DC.
Correspondence should be sent to Linda Goler Blount, Black Womens Health Imperative,
55 M St SE, Washington DC 20003 (e-mail: lgblount@bwhi.org). Reprints can be ordered at
http://www.ajph.org by clicking the Reprints link.
This media review was accepted August 21, 2016.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303462

AJPH

November 2016, Vol 106, No. 11

AJPH BOOK & MEDIA

supporting themselves and their

families on their own. After we
saw Ray Rice knock his soon-tobe-wife, Janay Rice, unconscious
in an elevator, the #whyIstayed
and #whyIleft movements illustrated the deep conict women
have with intimate partner violence. Janay Rice was both lauded
and vilied for standing by her
man. Some saw stupefying
weakness, others saw tremendous
courage and strength.
Unfortunately, Lee, in reimagining a Greek fantasy, is not
alone in his disturbingly limited
view of womens agency. To
think that withholding sex from
men who are disenfranchised and
devalued by most of society is
a constructive way for women to
effect social change is ridiculous.
In reality, in trying to exert that
kind of control over their men,
these women would literally be
putting their own lives on the
line.
And so Lee proves hes out of
touch with reality, and Black
women continue to suffer.

November 2016, Vol 106, No. 11

AJPH

Research has shown that the

effects of continual exposure to
violence and racism for women
are similar to posttraumatic stress
disorder. These reactions include
depression, anxiety, and anger.5
The long-term impact of the
stress that violence places on
Black women is well documented. Allostasis, the physiological consequence of chronic
exposure to stress, is at the heart
of a number of adverse health
effects that disproportionately
impact Black women,6 including
increased cortisol levels, higher
rates of obesity, hypertension,
and heart disease. This stress essentially weathers the body and
can lead to premature mortality.
There have been many historical moments, which Lee is well
aware of, when women used their
brains and ingenuity, and not
their vaginas to achieve social
change. Gloria Richardson led
the Cambridge Movement in
1962 to ght for the civil rights of
residents of Cambridge, Maryland.
Richardson, who considered

herself a member of a community

of militant Black women said, I
think I turned out like a lot of
women in Cambridge. . . . When
we were attacked at demonstrations, [we] were the ones throwing
stones back at the whites.7 And,
there is the powerful Black Lives
Matter movement, originated and
led by three Black women to
protest racism and unjust killings of
Black men and women. They are
women ghting for change in their
communities.
Black women have a powerful
voice and we are not afraid to
put ourselves in harms way to
achieve social change. We dont
need to use satire or our vaginas
to tell that story.
Linda Goler Blount, MPH
REFERENCES
1. Oluo I. Chi-Raq is an insult: everything
about Spike Lees latest is awful.
The Portland Mercury. December 2,
2015. Available at: http://www.
portlandmercury.com/portland/chi-raqis-an-insult/Content?oid=17083852.
Accessed September 16, 2016.

2. Smith MD. Chi-raq reveals Spike

Lees outdated race politics. The Nation.
December 14, 2015. Available at: https://
www.thenation.com/article/chi-raqreveals-spike-lees-outdated-race-politics.
Accessed September 16, 2016.
3. Cohn D, Taylor P, Lopez MH,
Gallagher CA, Parker K, Maass KT, Gun
homicide rate down 49% since 1993 peak;
public unaware. Pew Research
Center. Available at: http://www.
pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/
gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since1993-peak-public-unaware. Accessed
September 16, 2016.
4. Gerney A, Parsons C. Women under
the gun: how gun violence affects women
and 4 policy solutions to better protect
them. Center for American Progress.
Available at: https://www.
americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/
report/2014/06/18/91998/womenunder-the-gun. Accessed September 16,
2016.
5. Waltermaurer E, Watson CA, McNutt
LA. Black womens health: the effect of
perceived racism and intimate partner
violence. Violence Against Women. 2006;
12(12):12141222.
6. Duru OK, Harawa NT, Kermah D,
Norris KC. Allostatic load burden and
racial disparities in mortality. J Natl Med
Assoc. 2012;104(1-2):8995.
7. Kisseloff J. Generation on Fire: Voices of
Protest From the 1960s. Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press; 2006:54.

Blount

Media Review

1899

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.