Film Review & Political Commentary:
BlackKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee, is based on a New York Times bestseller by Ron Stallworth. Available for home viewing on DVD.
By C.E. Clark
Since its founding 156 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan has never died. It becomes dormant for decades, resting quietly in the dark hinterlands of this moribund Republic until The Moment arrives and the hooded spector arises to meet it. Throughout most of its existence, the Klan wasn’t a monolithic organization: one segment attained dominance surrounded by a constellation of smaller groups that called themselves the Klan, or some variation of the name.
“BlacKkKlansman” is set during a KKK revival in the early 1970s, one conjured by David Duke. (More about him later.) This Spike Lee film tells what many might consider an improbable tale: the infiltration of the Colorado Ku Klux Klan by Ron Stallworth, the first African-American hired as an officer by the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Stallworth (ably portrayed by John David Washington) was also the youngest officer elevated to detective within the department, originally as a “narc,” but later assigned to gather intelligence on individuals and groups that strayed from the political mainstream.
Stallworth’s first task in this capacity was to report on the reaction of a local crowd that gathered to hear a speech by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), a left-wing theoretician, organizer, and firebrand orator who popularized the slogan “Black Power!”
Stallworth’s memoir (which bears the same title as the film) provides a deeper dive into this incident and many others, while the film (and this review) skim the surface of the swamp Stallworth and a fellow undercover officer waded. However, the narrative arch of the book and film move swiftly. Both are so tightly organized that anything beyond a short summary will trigger a long string of spoiler alerts.
Here’s what can be told: Stallworth discovers a classified ad in the local newspaper placed by area Kluxers seeking new members; he calls the phone number listed in the ad and leaves a voice message expressing his interest; then receives a return call from a Klan screener who wants to set up a meeting with the new prospect; a white undercover cop is found to act as a stand-in for Stallworth.
The ensuing developments (accurate or adjusted for dramatic purposes) offer plenty of taut, “what now?” moments that shouldn’t be revealed in this review. There is one scene (a non-spoiler) that oozes irony and dark comedy in which the resourceful Stallworth phones the Klan’s national headquarters to expedite his membership in the Invisible Empire. By chance, he finds himself speaking with—and greatly impressing—head Kluxer David Duke, who quickly obliged Stallworth’s request.
And so the descent of Stallworth and his surrogate into the lower depths of a bizarre twilight realm begins in earnest.
One significant disagreement this reviewer has involves the film’s depiction of David Duke. It makes more of him than he ever was or aspired to become.
Despite the glowing eyes of the actor (Topher Grace) who took the role and delivered his lines with enormous conviction, the real David Duke lacked any sort of gravitas. More a case of hucksterism than an authentic commitment to kluxsterism, Duke appropriated the Klan brand as a means for furthering his personal ambitions.
The Klan was only one in a series of transitions: Duke migrated to the KKK’s 100% Americanism in an attempt to distance himself from his previous embrace of Nazism, then jettisoned his Kluxer baggage by reviving the defunct National Association for the Advancement of White People. Finally, feeling he had gained enough altitude to fly above his past, Duke became a candidate for various political offices in Louisiana. The film shows Duke before his rounds of plastic surgery and ideological makeovers. He would later apply a thick layer of “Christian love” to hide the pockmarks of his hate-filled history.
Aside from rank opportunism and boundless ambition, perhaps the only constants in Duke’s checkered career are credible accusations of his raiding organizational funds for personal use (read gambling and womanizing) and shady practices that resulted in a federal prison sentence.
One wonders how such an obvious con artist could attract the sort of notice that allowed him to gain a following. Well, with a university education and an ability to form coherent sentences, Duke ran counter to the stereotypical image of the Klan’s leadership. He rapidly became a sort of two-headed calf that the media too frequently displayed in an electronic sideshow. Worse still, probing questions about his Nazi affiliations and misuse of finances either were not asked or interviewers didn’t subject Duke’s anemic excuses to robust challenge. (Note to journalists: do your research.)
Since then, Duke has kept on milking financial contributions through his website, but demands for paid personal appearances have declined almost to the vanishing point. Although Duke is no longer a significant figure, he continues attempting to claw his way into the present.
In a larger sense, the past he represents is unlikely to be our future. Let us be less concerned with the last of the old and focus instead on the beginnings of the new, even though the shape of things to come will retain some familiar contours.
The real danger lies in those who are able to perfect a formula that draws disaffected white people to an innovative ideology—something beyond Trumpism without Trump—that more effectively mobilizes the fears felt by greater numbers of the malevolent or misguided.
Here we might well ask the question posed by poet William Butler Yeats: “[W]hat rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem [to give birth]?”
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Cameron Eugene Clark is a self-described “old, white, American-born Protestant” who has lived in the Mississippi Delta, southern Florida, and northern Virginia, and resides in western Massachusetts. He knows a thing or two about the Klan and right-wing racist politics.
