The political attack ad opens with text on the screen: “On a Sunday afternoon in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood …” We hear birds chirping and a dog barking. Then, in grainy doorbell camera footage, we see a woman walking down a tree-lined sidewalk.
A car stops in the middle of the street. Three individuals jump out and rush her. She screams. They encircle her, throw her to the ground and grab at her. As her screams continue, the words “Pritzker. Lightfoot.” appear on the screen over an image of Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot. And then: “How much worse does it have to get?”
The ad is the handiwork of the People Who Play by the Rules Political Action Committee. Funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, this entity is also the source of the Chicago City Wire, an anti-criminal justice reform propaganda sheet disguised as a community newspaper that has been appearing in people’s mailboxes in targeted Chicago neighborhoods.
Viewed on its own terms, as an exercise in the dark art of racist fearmongering for political ends, the ad is perversely effective. Although we cannot tell for sure, we assume the three attackers are men, and we assume they are Black. I listened to it closely, and at one point, amid the woman’s screams, it was possible for me to make out a muffled cry of “Rape!” Yet it’s not necessary to hear that word to grasp what the footage is meant to convey. In fact, according to news reports on the incident, the assailants were after the woman’s fanny pack containing her wallet and phone. But we can see for ourselves: They are predators, and she is their prey. It’s impossible not to respond viscerally to the sound of her primal terror.
Her piercing screams have a particular resonance for me because I hear in them the voice of my wife. On a Sunday morning earlier this summer, we were the victims of a similar crime outside our home in Kenwood.
We were about to set out on a trip to California. I had brought our luggage down and was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for our ride to the airport, as my wife descended the stairs from our third-floor apartment.
A car came speeding down the street toward me. I registered its approach and wondered if the driver would observe the stop sign — a 50-50 proposition in this era of fraying social bonds.
The car did stop, at which point three masked men jumped out. One had a handgun extended. They rushed toward me. It all happened very fast.
“What do you want?” I asked the man with the gun. “What you got?” he replied. I gave him my wallet.
At that moment, my wife emerged from our building, saw a man pointing a gun at my chest and began to scream.
The other two men ran toward her. They ripped her bag from her shoulder and grabbed her cellphone, injuring her hand in the process.
Then they sped away.
The episode left us with sensory scars we continue to nurse. For my wife: the recurring image, as she experienced it, of me about to be shot. And for me: the echoing of her screams.
It also left us with the knotty conundrum of how to understand and manage the presence of fear in our lives.
These questions have been particularly acute for my wife, for whom the attack reawakened the trauma of past violence. In the aftermath of the incident, she spoke of feeling unmoored. No longer at home in the world, she was exhausted by the strain of navigating her day in a state of hypervigilance.
What was most unsettling for her, as she described it, was not the fact that we were robbed at gunpoint in front of our home. It was rather the knowledge that at any moment, violence might come rushing with stunning suddenness and swiftness. She was flooded with heightened lucidity about the reality of violence in the world while, at the same time, her capacity for risk assessment was disabled.
For me, it was different. (Perhaps our experiences would have been more alike, had our perspectives been reversed, and I had witnessed a frantic young man pointing a gun at her.) What I felt most intensely was an angry resistance to being afraid. Or to put it differently, I was afraid of what yielding to fear would take from me, of how it would diminish my world.
It’s these sorts of all-too-human confusions that the “Lakeview Scream” manipulates. The fact is that if the crime my wife and I endured had been captured on video, the producers of the ad might have seized on it for their purposes. Their ad is not an instance of disinformation. The incident it depicts really did happen to a woman on a street in Lakeview. Such crimes are a matter of pressing public concern. It goes without saying that this is a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech. So why do I find the ad so reprehensible and at the same time worth interrogating?
What makes it instructive is the way it exposes the interface between the realities of violence — particular blows inflicted by particular hands against particular bodies — and our often hallucinatory public discourse in which fear of violent crime is exploited for political gain. Like the infamous Willie Horton ad deployed by the campaign of George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election, it heartlessly manipulates our capacity for empathy.
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The medium for this dangerous magic is fear that arises from our emotional cores and is animated by our deepest concerns for those we love and for our own survival. Fear of this nature overrides whatever else we know about the world. It blocks our capacity for perception and inquiry. It creates conditions in which ignorance can coexist with knowledge, blindness with vision. This dynamic renders us vulnerable to manipulation. Even a proposition that is absurd on its face becomes plausible when infused with the cogency of fear — in this case, the implied argument that modest criminal justice reforms designed to ease the devastation of mass incarceration have loosed hordes of Black criminals to prey upon middle-class neighborhoods.
While addressing the realities of violence — and holding political actors accountable — it’s essential to give proper weight as well to the harms that arise from the fear of violence. Such fears are a primary cause of the erosion of our democracy, prompting citizens to withdraw from one another, retreat from civic engagement and adopt private solutions to public problems, thereby contributing to the atrophying of public institutions. They fuel the persistent dynamic by which entire neighborhoods and those who live there are stigmatized and seen as “other,” leading to grave misjudgments about the conditions of life around us.
Among the greatest dangers posed by the fear of violence is that we will lose sight of our true resources for being safe and secure: the care and solidarity of human beings acting together. Our imaginations are shaped by the violent act. We find it much harder to take in the ongoing work of repair and maintenance of the world — all the acts of kindness, civility and solidarity that make life supportable, all the humane and constructive responses to violence — that constitute so much of our common life.
The challenge is not to live without fear but to make it a vehicle for widening the lens through which we take in the world. As we consider the issue of crime and safety in the neighborhood, the critical question is how spacious or cramped is our understanding of that neighborhood. Who are our neighbors?
Two weeks after my wife and I were robbed at gunpoint, a woman named Simone — how I wish I had gotten her last name — and her 10-year-old daughter pulled up in front of our building. They had driven from the West Side to return my wife’s driver’s license and a couple of credit cards she had found discarded on the street. The child proudly told us that her mother was going to mail the cards, but she had persuaded her mother to bring them to us. This simple act of neighborliness restored something for us.
“I’m sorry,” Simone said to my wife, as we parted, “about whatever you went through.”
Jamie Kalven is founder of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization on the South Side that received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
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