What’s in a name?

MORE than a quarter of a century has passed since Spike Lee made “Do the Right Thing”—a film about racial tensions exploding into violence in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a mostly African-American district of New York. At the time, some (white) critics warned that blacks would riot after seeing it. In another contentious film, “Bamboozled”, Mr Lee, who is black, poured scorn on racism in the entertainment industry and the way blacks are portrayed in the media. He frequently comes up with examples of anti-black bias in Hollywood, or laments the gentrification of black neighbourhoods.

Mr Lee’s latest project is ruffling feathers even before filming starts in the next few days, but this time it is blacks who are annoyed. He is working on a movie with the working title “Chiraq”, which will focus on black-on-black violence on the South Side of Chicago, one of the poorest, most violent parts of the city. A Chicago-based rapper, Louis Johnson (aka King Louie), claims that he came up with the name Chiraq a few years ago, conjuring up images of a war zone. It was tossed around on social-media channels, printed on T-shirts, acquired its own Twitter hashtag, #Chiraq, and was taken up by other rappers such as Tavares Taylor (Lil Reese), who rapped in “Traffic”: “Where I’m from? This Chiraq, you get left as tragic.”

Yet as soon as “Chiraq” became more popular, a social-media campaign (with hashtag #AntiChiraq) started to reject it. “People who live on the South Side don’t like the term, which they feel further stigmatises their neighbourhoods,” says William Burns, an alderman on the South Side. He is urging the state of Illinois to withhold a $3m tax break for Mr Lee’s project, arguing that, to qualify for the credit, a film has to make a “positive economic contribution” to Illinois, and that this one is not looking as if it will.

Chekitan Dev, a marketing expert at Cornell University, agrees that in the short term “Chiraq” may do some damage to the city. Yet in the longer run, he says, Mr Lee may be doing a service by shining a spotlight on the South Side. In the 1970s and 1980s, scores of films were made about violent crime in New York, which was then as broke as Chicago is today. These films probably helped the city in the long term, by focusing the minds of policymakers on bringing down crime rates.

At a press conference on May 14th at St Sabina’s, a Catholic church on the South Side, Mr Lee dismissed his critics as “people who don’t know the hell what they are talking about”. He was flanked by Father Michael Pfleger, St Sabina’s priest and an ardent anti-gun campaigner; John Cusack, a popular actor who will star in the film; and mothers who have lost their children to gun violence. “We cannot ignore this reality,” said Father Pfleger, after citing grim city statistics for the first 144 days of this year: 116 people have already been killed in more than 780 shootings.

Though hundreds of South-Siders lined up for the casting call for extras for the film earlier this month, many remain sceptical. Kyle Holder, a hairdresser, says that she would feel differently if the film were a serious documentary, but she doesn’t like the idea of local suffering becoming a lucrative entertainment vehicle for Mr Lee. (The film will apparently be a musical based on Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata”, a comedy about women who try to end the Peloponnesian war by refusing to have sex with their husbands until the fighting is over.) And according to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, an activist group, Mr Lee’s film will also ignore some salient causes of the violence, such as heavy-handed policing and decades of neglect by city government.

“They are going to look stupid and be on the wrong side of history,” Mr Lee said of his latest critics, comparing them to those who objected so long ago to “Do the Right Thing”. He may be annoyed by the controversy, but it is creating lots of presumably welcome publicity. And meanwhile he is trying to win South Siders over in his own defiant way: on Memorial Day, May 25th, he is planning to attend a block party at St Sabina’s.