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Workers Vanguard No. 1139
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7 September 2018
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https://archive.fo/rfvLm
BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee Says Racist Cops Can “Do the Right Thing”
Spike Lee’s movie BlacKkKlansman opens with
powerful images of racist terror and violence in the United States, from
the Confederate slavocracy to Klan lynchings, as well as
white-supremacist nostalgia depicted in Gone with the Wind. Timed
for release on the anniversary of the 2017 fascist rampage in
Charlottesville, the film ends with chilling footage of the murder of
Heather Heyer and the beating of black hip-hop artist DeAndre Harris by a
gang of club-wielding fascist thugs. Yet the truth of these searing
scenes is used to promote the grotesque lie that the racist police are
allies in the fight against fascist terror.
Loosely based on the story of Ron Stallworth, a black cop
who initiated the infiltration of the Klan in Colorado Springs in the
1970s, BlacKkKlansman presents the cops as heroes. Needless to
say, this requires not a little fabrication. To invent the supposed
risks taken by the police, the white cop who in real life stood in for
Stallworth at KKK meetings is portrayed as a Jewish cop who narrowly
escapes being exposed (circumcision and all) by a Klansman. A similarly
concocted scene toward the end of the movie shows Stallworth and his
fictitious black radical girlfriend teaming up with the chief of police
and other “good” cops to set up and bust a white racist “bad” cop. That
never happened and never would. But it serves to excuse cop terror as
simply that of a few hardcore racists. In fact, the cops, as a core
component of the capitalist state, are the main perpetrators of daily
racist violence in this country. The victims of cop terror—Michael
Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and countless others—are blatantly
disappeared in Lee’s film.
Hip-hop artist Boots Riley, whose recent semi-surrealist movie Sorry to Bother You is an explicit commentary on race and class oppression in capitalist America, issued a scathing rebuke of BlacKkKlansman.
Immediately summing up his critique of Lee’s film in a #quickfilmreview
tweet which read, “Fuck the police,” Riley later wrote a more extensive
exposé, commenting: “It’s a made up story in which the false parts of
it try to make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist
oppression. It’s being put while Black Lives Matter is a discussion, and
this is not coincidental.” Pointing to the fact that Spike Lee was paid
$200,000 by the New York Police Department to collaborate in an ad
campaign to supposedly “improve” police relations with minorities, Riley
remarked that BlacKkKlansman “feels like an extension of that ad campaign.”
Of course there is an element of revenge fantasy in the
idea that Stallworth, a black man, was in real life able to dupe the
Klan and that one of the chumps was none other than former KKK Grand
Wizard David Duke. But that is only one piece of the story. Lee’s cop
hero served as a police operative who spied on leftist organizations. In
his memoir, Stallworth recounts his investigation of the ostensibly
communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which he describes as
“extremely radical, organized, and dedicated to their conviction of
ultimately ‘smashing’ the Ku Klux Klan.” Stallworth would alternate
between going undercover in PLP meetings to gather information about
anti-Klan actions and acting as a security detail for David Duke
himself. He informed both the Klan and the police about PLP
counterdemonstrations against Duke, protecting the Klan from those who
intended to stop its race-terror provocations.
The only hint of Stallworth’s infiltration of left-radical organizations in BlacKkKlansman
is when he spies on a Colorado Springs meeting featuring Kwame Ture
(Stokely Carmichael). Lee uses this scene to portray Stallworth as both a
cop doing his job and a black man drawn into Ture’s “black power”
message. The scene also serves to develop a fictional romantic
relationship between Stallworth and a radical young Black Student Union
leader. Unbelievably, she sticks with Stallworth even after learning
that he is a cop, something no self-respecting leftist would do. Toward
the end of the movie, Stallworth and his girlfriend are propelled
together down a hallway, guns drawn in unison pointed at a
white-supremacist cross-burning. The purpose is to peddle the lie that
black cops and black radicals have a common interest.
It is not a secret that police agents have a sordid
history of derailing, disrupting and “neutralizing” left and black
radical organizations. Stallworth’s real-life surveillance of PLP was
consistent with the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO,
which in its official form ended in the early 1970s. Launched in 1956
against the Communist Party, COINTELPRO later unleashed a savage
campaign of racist sabotage and murder against others deemed subversive.
Its deadliest fire was aimed at the Black Panther Party, which
defiantly organized armed self-defense against the racist cops. Panther
leader Fred Hampton and 37 others were killed, and hundreds imprisoned.
Today the FBI continues to target left groups and activists around Black
Lives Matter, branding them “Black Identity Extremists.”
BlacKkKlansman buries the deadly history of
collusion between the cops, government and the Klan. State agents who
infiltrated the Klan were often active participants in racist terror and
murder. One infamous FBI informant, Gary Rowe, was involved in the 1963
bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which
killed four young black girls. Two years later, Rowe was in the car and
may have been the actual triggerman who shot civil rights worker Viola
Liuzzo on the highway outside Selma, Alabama.
Federal as well as state and local police agencies took
part in the 1979 KKK/Nazi murder of five union organizers and
anti-racist activists associated with the Communist Workers Party in
Greensboro, North Carolina. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
agent helped train the fascist killers and a police/FBI informer rode
shotgun in the lead car while a local police car followed behind. The
ensuing massacre was carried out in broad daylight and in full view of
TV cameras. Nonetheless, the fascists were acquitted by all-white
juries. In 2014, one of the Greensboro killers, Frazier Glenn Miller,
gunned down three people outside Jewish community facilities in Kansas.
At least Spike Lee’s earlier movie Do the Right Thing showed
the NYPD in true form, e.g., getting away with murder. Now he uses his
filmmaking talents to push the myth that the racist police can “do the
right thing.” Responding to Riley’s criticisms of BlacKkKlansman,
Lee retorted: “Look at my films: they’ve been very critical of the
police, but on the other hand I’m never going to say all police are
corrupt, that all police hate people of color…. I mean, we need police.”
And, it’s not just the police that Lee thinks “we need.”
Lee opined in a CNN interview that he hoped the movie would inspire
people “to register to vote” (Democrat), arguing that Trump’s presidency
is evidence of “what happens when you don’t vote.” At various points, BlacKkKlansman draws
a connection between the fascist Duke and Duke’s hero president. That
Trump is a raving racist who has coddled and encouraged the fascists is
hardly news. But the Democrats no less than the Republicans represent
the interests of racist American capitalism. The only difference is that
the Democrats serve it up with a hefty dose of hypocrisy aimed at
obscuring the racial oppression and brutal exploitation of the working
class that are inherent to this system.
While BlacKkKlansman is movingly dedicated to
Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer, one need only fast-forward one
year to last month’s anti-fascist protests to puncture the lie that the
cops are anything but the enemies of black people, the working class and
oppressed. An open letter to Spike Lee from “The Young People of the
Charlottesville Attack” (21 August) contrasts Lee’s rosy depiction of
the cops with the reality of Charlottesville this year and last year,
where police escorted and protected the fascist killers while repressing
anti-racist activists. The letter writers noted: “We were met by a
force who sought to control, suppress and attack us. And it wasn’t just
the ones who showed up with hoods and torches. Most of them wore
badges.”
As we said in the aftermath of Charlottesville last year (WV No. 1116, 25 August 2017):
“The outrage against the fascists needs an organized
expression: a disciplined, militant and military mobilization of the
social power of the multiracial working class. It is this power that is
feared and hated by the bosses, their kept labor lieutenants in the
trade-union bureaucracy and capitalist politicians of all colors and
genders. The working class has the power and the objective interest not
only to stop the fascists but also to overturn the whole capitalist
system that spawns these vermin.”
Rather than the shell game of voting for the capitalist
Democratic Party, what is needed is to build a revolutionary party that
will wield workers’ social power in the fight for black freedom and the
emancipation of all the oppressed. It will take nothing less than a
socialist revolution to break the chains of racist capitalist rule and
bury the fascist gangs for good.
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