Chiraq Literary Trope Analysis

In 2009, drill rapper King Louie began using the idiom Chiraq to describe the violence and warfare like conditions of Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the Southeast side of Chicago ravaged by disinvestment and urban decay. Created as an amalgamation of Chicago and Iraq, the term was used in an insular capacity by the rapper as well as other black youth in the immediate area including the Dro City Gang, a faction of the ill-famed Gangster Disciples. Chiraq as an expression evoked similar corollaries of the war metaphor, a literary trope used to heighten attention to and incite deep concern for a professed societal problem often with very little context behind the issue itself. Additionally, the renaming of geographical places in rap music and Hip

These perceived astounding numbers coupled with the click bait headline from a local news source stating that, “For ten minutes, it seemed like a shooting was everywhere in the South Chicago neighborhood (CBS News)” led to Chiraq being used to describe the violence problem in Chicago. Despite the clear subjective nature of the statement, this type of languaging with very little to no context allowed irresponsible journalists and pundits outside of Chicago to widely use it also as a form of indirect place branding, which ultimately led to the unfair labeling of Chicago as the murder capital of the United States. This also contributed to an amplified examination and judgment of the Southside, the black residents who lived there and rappers like King Louie, Chief Keef and other emerging artists in the drill music scene whose music and lifestyles were blamed for the assumed increase in violence coupled with pejorative racial and class based ideologies that placed blame over historical analysis and

I will use a monochromatic color ramp (green) to identify all the community areas of Chicago using a range of crime based data as my value field. This will help to identify and visually place the community area where Woodlawn is located. (City of Chicago Data Portal).

Vector Layer Boundaries-Neighborhoods Shapefile-this layer will be used to pinpoint Woodlawn and other adjacent neighborhoods within the community area. It will also help to create the necessary buffer to examine the murder rate of the neighborhoods next to to Woodlawn that are all within the same community area. I will use single symbol features to identify the neighborhoods. (City of Chicago Data Portal)

Flat Databases:

Crimes 2001 to present dataset (City of Chicago data portal) will be used to map crime in the Woodlawn neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods within the community area between 2010-2014. (City of Chicago Data