Adam Driver and John David Washington in the new Spike Lee movie, BlacKkKlansman.
Spike Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman, which tells the true story of a black police detective from Colorado Springs who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1978, made me want to scream with anger.
It also made me want to vote.
For the past three decades, Lee has served as this country’s pop cinema apostle of black consciousness. School Daze (1988), Do The Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Bamboozled (2000), and Chi-Raq (2015), to name just a few, are not simply towering achievements of art and entertainment. They’re provocative investigations into what it means to be black in post-Civil Rights America.
Never without humor and a celebratory pride in black culture, Lee’s films create a complex array of primarily black characters who discover that this country’s long history of exploiting and denigrating black people is manifest in their own specific lives, communities, and times in which they live.
BlacKkKlansman is no exception. It tells the story of Ron Stallworth, played by John David Washington, a rookie detective on the Colorado Springs police force who reaches out to the local chapter of the KKK soon after getting his badge in 1978.
He establishes himself as a trustworthy-sounding hater of blacks, Jews, and immigrants, and then infiltrates the chapter with the help of a Jewish colleague, Flip Zimmerman, played by Adam Driver, to determine just how dangerous the white supremacist organization is nearly a century after its birth.
Stallworth makes the calls, adopting a flat, anonymizing affect when on the phone with everyone from the local chapter president to Grand Wizard and KKK National Director David Duke (played by Topher Grace), while Zimmerman shows up to the living room meetings and Klan initiation rituals in person, gathering intel and trying not to blow the detectives’ dual cover.
The story is outrageous. But, based on a 2014 memoir by the actual retired Colorado Springs Police Sgt. Ron Stallworth, the story is also true.
Lee’s movie offers a dizzying plenitude of ideas to consider — everything from the social and psychological effects of “passing,” to the influence that movies like 1915’s Birth of a Nation played in perpetuating hateful racial stereotypes and real-world violence, to the question of whether racially integrated police forces are an effective solution to ending police brutality against minority communities. But the aspect of BlacKkKlansman that left me the most viscerally shook after the movie had ended, and that leaves me most inspired to hit the ballot box this Tuesday, is its depiction of the affable, earnest political ambitions of KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
The real David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He came in second place in the Republican Party primary.
More recently, he’s emerged as a supporter of President Donald Trump and showed up at last year’s neo-Nazi-infused Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which ended when an avowed white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters and killed a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer.
In BlacKkKlansman, Topher Grace plays David Duke as the “new” kind of Klan leader: kindly, avuncular, a thin young mustachioed man with hair down to his ears and a big smile, who uses phrases like “darn tootin’” and “what I can I do you for?”
Set toward the end of the Jimmy Carter administration, the Klan members’ suburban living rooms and hotel lobbies in Lee’s movie are replete with posters of Richard Nixon, whose law and order candidacy and Southern Strategy helped migrate many white voters disdainful of the Civil Rights Movement over to the Republican Party.
Although BlacKkKlansman has plenty of gun-toting, plastic-explosive-packing KKK diehards who are more than comfortable resorting to violence in the street to preserve their vision of a white America, Duke represents something else: the political ambitions of white supremacy moderated in rhetoric to accommodate the sensitivity of the white voting public, but as comfortable as the KKK of old with an extremist doctrine of racial separation, exclusion, and hatred.
Side conversations in this movie include familiar lines like “Make America Great Again” and “America First,” and a political lawn sign shares the seemingly innocuous message: “America: Love it or leave it.”
Without being too heavy handed, Lee leaves his audience with the clear message that there is a direct connection between the white supremacy message of the KKK and the white identity politics that Duke hopes to promote in mainstream political culture.
Juxtaposed with Stallworth’s own flirtations with a local college’s black student union, including a visually breathtaking sequence reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which Stallworth attends a Black Power lecture by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and recognizes alongside dozens of natural-haired students the revolutionary power of saying “Black is Beautiful,” Lee’s depiction of the normalization and politicization of white supremacy through the figure of David Duke is harrowing.
Lee draws a direct link between 1978 Colorado Springs and 2017 Charlottesville, and the dotted line between the two is white violence slowly infiltrating politics, and then exploding at the other end for the unmitigated hatred that it represents.
Like many of Lee’s most politically-conscious movies, BlacKkKlansman includes the directive “wake up!” Anyone watching knows that line is not uttered simply for the protagonist to hear. It’s a call to political arms for the audience, urging them to recognize that the status quo of police brutality, gun violence, economic stagnation, and mass media racial stereotyping can be overcome only by both knowledge and action.
BlacKkKlansman is not just a thoughtful, entertaining, and artfully crafted work of cinema, though it is also all of those things. It is a rallying cry to understand that explicit white supremacy exists in American politics today, just as it always has. And it is a call to vote, to vote at every opportunity you can, to make sure that people who espouse such hateful ideas never get a chance to represent this country again.
The real David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991. He came in second place in the Republican Party primary.
True.
But the The Democratic Party is White Supremacist, Too
Neither party gives a damn about Black people's right to self-determination.Therefore, the American electoral duopoly is composed of two white supremacist parties: the Republicans, for whom white supremacy is an organizing principle, and the Democrats, the party that claims the allegiance of virtually all Black voters, but whose mission is to politically pacify and neutralize Blacks, in service of the ruling class.Democrats rig the game, too, when they get the chance, although it's an uphill race. Both parties, however, are intent to preserve the duopoly system that splits the U.S. polity between them, for the benefit of their corporate masters. And neither party gives a damn about Black people's right to self-determination -- which includes the ability to elect representatives and executives of their choice, unless that choice is a Democrat or Republican.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/democratic-party-white-supremacist-too