Spike is back, and he’s in rare form as he rips the covers off of the rampant and ingrained racism that is still all too prevalent in America today by making the purveyors of hatred into 1970s era virtually cartoonish characters that gleefully spew out their particular brand of filth. His film shows that little has changed in this country over the last half-century other than clothes, cars and hairstyles.
BlacKkKlansman (this is really how the title is spelled, it’s not a typo) is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs police officer — played adequately by John David Washington, Denzel’s son — who went undercover in the late 1970s to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. The crux of the film is that virulent racism is a malignancy that can lie dormant, just below the surface, under the radar if you will, only to spring back to life at a later date as it did in Charlottesville, VA last year.
In fact, the release of the film was timed to coincide with the anniversary of that deadly event, the one where Donald Trump, the next day, finally showed his true colors and support for Nazis by declaring “there were good people on both sides.”
Lee pulls no punches with a story that, if it had been presented to audiences before Trump’s ascendency to the White House, would have been deemed too heavy-handed, too fantastic, too skewered. But given the fluidity and quickness of the racial/political arena and how fast we are descending into madness, Lee could have gone even further in turning the Klansmen into clowns.
One only needs to look at how the diabolical twisting of the truth has given rise to QAnon, by far the wackiest conspiracy theory the world has ever seen. Nothing could have prepared Lee to capture nonsense of this depth on camera.
No matter how sick and tormented Spike Lee made these losers in his film, in real life they are far, far worse. When David Duke, the Grand Dragon (or is it Grand Wizard or Lizard?) of the Klan. takes center stage, we learn where Trump got the terms he uses, such as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” — he stole them from Duke, who originated them in the ’70s for the same divisive purposes.
Near the beginning of the actor Cory Hawkins portrays Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and does an excellent job of explaining the genesis of black pride and power. If the demands by blacks for change, and the pushback by whites seeking to maintain the antiquated status quo, were not crystal clear in your mind when you entered the theater, they were when you came out. Spike Lee didn’t take any prisoners — or give bigots anywhere to hide.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.