Danai calls to tell the men there is a problem.

I love the portrayal of black women in this film. Like they are the brains of the operation and the protectors of the realm. You got Danai and the Dora Mijale. The High Council got lady elders. Lupita is out there saving the world and women. Little Sis is fueling the technology.

Wakanda is the most advanced nation on earth for many reasons. There's the virbranium, of course. And they've never been colonized so their best resources, including people, weren't stolen and they don't get the inferiority complex that comes with being subjugated, but on top of all of that, they are winning because the entire population is allowed to operate at their full potential. You create a society where half of the population are given agency, allowed equal seats at the table, and encouraged to thrive and you end up with a really dope place, you end up with Paradise.

Someone get Dap Dunlap on the bullhorn and tell him to wake the people up.

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*

I went into Chi-raq expecting to love, or at least like it. I’m a big Spike Lee fan. For years, I had posters of School Daze and Bamboozled, an entirely satiric film, hanging on my walls. I own most of Lee’s films on DVD. Still. And while the film has received a lot of controversy, so has every other Spike Lee film. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. So that didn’t faze me either.

But, um… the only thing keeping me from saying “hated it!” and giving a Z-snap formation like Antoine Merrriweather and Blaine Edwards from In Living Color are the messages in Chi-raq. There are great discussions about the impact of violence in Chicago—the deaths and the bullet-ridden bodies of the living. There’s a lot of “that needed to be said” about the prison industrial complex and the NRA having politicians in pocket, and how something more would be done if the same violence that occurs in some Black neighborhoods happened in White neighborhoods. It needed to pointed out where all these problems stem from, especially high unemployment rates that lead to an underground economy out of necessity. Someone with a platform as big as Lee’s needed to get on a microphone and say, “this”, ie, the violence in Chicago, “is a disgrace!”

I Went to See Black Panther 3x and This Is What I Thought

Chi-Raq Didn't Miss the Mark, It Went Off the Grid

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