Howard Davis Review: Reclaiming The N-Word – Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman

Reclaiming The N-Word –
Spike Lee’s
BlacKkKlansman Confronts White
Supremacism
W.E.B. Du
BoisThis article is dedicated to the
memory of Jamie Du Bois
and Maxwell Farrell Davis, my
Constant Inspiration.

Black resistance to
institutional racism in the US has a long, tangled, and
traumatic intellectual history. Although we may have assumed
much too easily that white supremacists like David Duke had
become marginalised as a political force, in reality they
never really disappeared. Last year’s events in
Charlottesville revealed just how deeply embedded the roots
of racial hatred and animosity lie buried – as well as how
close to the surface such polarising beliefs remain. The
2016 US presidential election and subsequent actions of
America’s Commander in Chief have only served to demonstrate
the alarming truth of novelist David Foster Wallace’s
prescient warning that there is no such thing as not
voting.

In 1895, the year Frederick Douglass died, Booker
T Washington gave a speech comparing black and white people
to the fingers on a hand, separated but working together in
conjunction with each other. Washington recommended that
black people accept Jim Crow, stop agitating for restoration
of the civil rights they had enjoyed during Reconstruction,
and concentrate instead on self-improvement and economic
development. Washington’s conciliatory approach made his
autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), a best-seller
and he was hailed as the most influential black spokesman of
his day. Theodore Roosevelt even invited him to dinner at
the White House. Washington’s programme may have won him a
degree of white admiration, but he never managed to persuade
many black people, at least as far as sociologist and
historian W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned. In The Souls of
Black Men (1903), Du Bois argued that the influence of
three main attitudes could be traced throughout the history
of black Americans in response to their condition – “a
feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all
thought and action to the will of the greater group; or,
finally, a determined effort at self-realization and
self-development despite environing opinion.”

For Du
Bois, Washington represented an unforgivable attitude of
submission and his Tuskegeee Movement came to stand for
backwater gradualism. This debate between Washington and Du
Bois revealed some of the basic oppositions between North
and South and urban and rural communities which defined
black America at the time. Identifying what Arnold Rampersad
has termed “an essential dualism in the black American
soul,” Du Bois went on to explore the idea of a
double-consciousness – “One ever feels his two-ness – an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” This
conflict between national and racial identity incorporates
both a form of political expression
(integrationist/separatist) and a psychological meaning
(good/bad black; masked black self/real black self).

In
the 1960s, frustration with integration as the primary goal
of civil rights began Washington’s rehabilitation as an
early advocate of black self-sufficiency. His influence is
apparent in the work of contemporary writer Ta-Nehisi
Coates, who grew up in segregated West Baltimore, where his
father was a chapter head of the local Black Panther Party.
The Panthers considered their emphasis on defending black
communities against racist agents of the state like the FBI
as revolutionary. Malcolm X (one of Spike Lee’s heroes and
the subject of possibly his best movie) thought that Du
Bois’ concept of double consciousness was largely a problem
for the black middle class. Even when black people could see
themselves for themselves, a lingering question remained
about whether the white power structure could ever be
reformed, overthrown, or even escaped. According to DH
Lawrence, the American soul is essentially hard, isolated,
stoic, and a killer. If white supremacy is still at the root
of the social order in the US, then so are the temptations
of hate, despair, and doubt, as Du Bois framed them. When
black students baited Ralph Ellison in the 1960s for his
detachment from the protest movement, he responded by
insisting that writing the best novel he could was his
contribution to the struggle. But, in the words of a popular
sixties saying, there is a Malcolm X waiting to emerge from
the soul of every black person. By the time George Clinton’s
Funkadelic started singing “free your mind and your ass
will follow” in 1970, only militant black resistance was
assumed to be an authentic and valid response to endemic and
systematic racism.

Times have changed since then. “As we
move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third
road – being themselves,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his
most recent publication, We Were Eight Years in Power: An
American Tragedy, a collection of eight essays on
politics and black history written during Obama’s two terms
of office and introduced with some new reflections. Its
title is taken from a speech that a South Carolina
congressman made in 1895 when Reconstruction in the state
was terminated by a white supremacist takeover. For Coates,
racism has always been the main action and dealing with it
just a knee jerk form of reaction, which is why he believes
black thinkers and artists should now try to turn things
around, to transcend race, and escape from all forms of
white jurisdiction.

Coates declares that when Obama first
ran for president in 2008, the civil rights generation was
“exiting the American stage – not in a haze of nostalgia
but in a cloud of gloom troubled by the persistence of
racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following
in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the
country to black America’s fate.” According to Coates,
Obama’s rise was so rapid because African-Americans were
“war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that
was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were
sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing.
There was a broad sense that integration had failed.”

As a teenager immersed in hip-hop culture, it angered
Coates that other black students at his private school had
no idea where or when Du Bois died (Ghana, in 1963), but got
worked up over the anniversary of the assassination of
Biggie Smalls. Indeed, his biography reads much like a hip
hop song, infused with all the anger and rage of the
projects. In 1995, Coates attended the Million Man March in
Washington DC at which the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan
urged black men to be better fathers and role models, but he
now rejects such assimilation, writing that “The essence
of American racism is disrespect.” Having a father around
and adhering to middle-class values have “never shielded
black people from plunder.” Located somewhere between
black people and the outside world, Du Bois had argued, was
the unasked question of what it felt like to be a problem.
Coates insists that even the best-intentioned liberals still
perceive being black as a social handicap. For him, white
people themselves are the problem – “Racism was banditry,
pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to
America, it was essential to it.”

In an echo of the
earlier Washington/Du Bois debate, the radical Harvard
intellectual Cornel West has blasted Coates for his narrow
notion of “defiance,” for choosing a “personal
commitment to writing with no connection to collective
action,” and for losing sight of the tradition of black
resistance. In the contemptuous eyes of West, Coates
represents the neo-liberal wing of the black freedom
struggle, much like Obama himself, and his argument amounts
to little more than misguided pessimism. West’s attack on
Coates has been likened to the scene in Ellison’s Invisible
Man in which young blindfolded black men are made to fight
each other in a ring for the amusement of whites. In his
autobiography Black Boy, Richard Wright recounted how he
tried to get the other boy he was matched up against to
stand with him and refuse to fight. Robin DG Kelly, author
of Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American
Original (2009), has tried to mediate between these
opposing positions, suggesting that both West and Coates
share this sense of fundamental pessimism and that black
movements have always exhibited a dual purpose – both
survival and ultimate victory.

Afro-pessimism and its
equation of withdrawal with transcendence is no less
accetable to white supremacists than Washington’s strategic
retreat into self-help. Harold Cruse, in his vehement work
of black nationalism The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual (1967), said flat out that Washington was
right and Du Bois had ended up on the wrong side of history,
that Marxism was just white people (i.e. Jews) telling black
people what to think. Writing well before Franz Fanon’s
ground-breaking investigation into the de-colonised mind was
translated into English, Cruse was largely regraded as a
crank at the time, but his view of black history in America
as a rigged game is becoming increasingly widely shared.
Afro-pessimism may derive in large part from Fanon’s bleak
vision of the future, but maybe it is just another name for
something that has existed in black culture for a long time.
It seems that Fanon’s work, with its wholesale rejection of
universal neo-liberalism, is being rediscovered and
celebrated everywhere these days, in much the same way that
posters of Malcolm X and Che Guevara used to adorn the walls
of so many college residence halls in the 1970s. So where
exactly does that leave contemporary black artists, caught
up in this confusing maelstrom of conflicting opinion and
argument?

Part of the second wave of US film
school graduates to work his way into the cinematic
mainstream, Spike Lee is indisputably America’s pre-eminent
black moviemaker. While Francis Ford Coppola attended UCLA
and Steven Spielberg went to USC, Lee followed in the
illustrious footsteps of Martin Scorsese, graduating from
NYU film school in the early 1980s. Courageously outspoken,
uncompromising, and well-versed in film history, he has
directed a variety of feature films and documentaries that
reveal him to be fully capable not only of producing
commercial hits when necessary, but also of articulating a
radical critique of American society’s endemic racism.
Eschewing the surface glitz and glamour of Hollywood, he has
remained close to New York’s Brooklyn/Fort Greene area,
relishing the relative independence his successful track
record deserves.

Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a
Mule Filmworks, first burst onto the silver screen in 1986
with She’s Gotta Have It (recently re-booted as a
Netflix TV series), and has since released such
ground-breaking films as Do the Right Thing (1989),
Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991),
Malcolm X (1992), Clockers (1995), The
Original Kings of Comedy (2000), 25th Hour
(2002), Inside Man (2006), and
Chi-Raq (2015). He has won numerous accolades,
including two nominations, a Student Award, and an Honorary
Award for his contributions to film from the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as two Emmys,
two Peabodys, an honorary BAFTA Award, an Honorary
César, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and a Grand
Prix Award.

With a budget of only $175,000, She’s
Gotta Have It was shot in just two weeks and grossed
over $7 million at the US box office alone. Do the Right
Thing was nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Original Screenplay in 1989, with many critics believing it
also deserved a nomination (Driving Miss Daisy won
Best Picture). In a 2006 New York magazine
interview, Lee said the other film’s success was based on
safe stereotypes that may have hurt his chances more than if
his film had not been nominated. In 1991, Lee taught a
film-making class at Harvard and two years later starting
teaching in the Graduate Film Program at NYU, where he was
appointed Artistic Director in 2002. His 1997
documentary 4 Little Girls, about the children
killed in the 1963 Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham,
Alabama, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Feature Documentary. In 2007, the San Francisco
International Film Festival honoured him with a Directing
Award, in 2008 he received the Wexner Prize, and in 2013 he
won the Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the
American arts, worth $300,000.

A prodigious director of
advertising commercials and music videos, Lee has
consistently focused his unflinching cinematic lens on race
relations, the black community, interracial relationships,
the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and
poverty, and many other social and political issues. His
films are notable for their unique stylistic elements, such
as their innovative use of soundtrack music and zooming
dolly shots that portray actors as though they were floating
through their surroundings. They are typically referred to
as ‘Spike Lee Joints,’ with the closing credits ending with
the phrases ‘By Any Means Necessary,’ ‘Ya Dig,’ and ‘Sho
Nuff.’ Only his 2013 film, Oldboy, used the
traditional ‘A Spike Lee Film’ credit after producers
heavily re-edited it.

Highly opinionated and often
cantankerous, Lee is no stranger to controversy. After the
release of Mo’ Better Blues, he was accused of
antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League which
criticized the depiction of club owners Josh and Moe
Flatbush, who were described as ‘Shylocks.’ Lee refuted the
charge, explaining that he invented the characters in order
to depict how black artists have always had to struggle
against cultural exploitation. Lee said that Lew Wasserman,
Sidney Sheinberg, or Tom Pollock, the Jewish heads of MCA
and Universal Studios, were unlikely to allow antisemitic
content in any films they produced. He said it was not
possible for him to make an antisemitic film because Jews
run Hollywood – and “that’s a fact.”

In 1999, the New York
Post reported that Lee made an inflammatory comment about
NRA President Charlton Heston while speaking to reporters at
the Cannes Film Festival. He was quoted as saying the NRA
should be disbanded and that someone should shoot Heston
“with a .44 Bull Dog,” which Lee claimed was intended
as a joke in response to questions about whether violence in
Hollywood films was responsible for school shootings. “The
problem is guns,” he said. Republican House Majority Leader
Dick Armery condemned Lee as having “nothing to offer the
debate on school violence except more violence and more
hate.”

In October 2005, Lee responded to a question on CNN
as to whether the government intentionally ignored the
plight of black Americans during Hurricane Katrina by
saying, “It’s not too far-fetched. I don’t put anything past
the United States government. I don’t find it too
far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people
out of New Orleans,” citing earlier government involvement
in the notorious Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the
Negro Male.

At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Lee (who was
in the process of making Miracle at St. Anna about
an all-black US division fighting in Italy during WWII)
criticized Clint Eastwood for not depicting black marines in
Flags of Our Fathers. Citing historical accuracy,
Eastwood responded that his film was specifically about the
Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima.
Eastwood pointed out that, while black Marines did indeed
fight at Iwo Jima, the US military was racially segregated
during WWII, and none of the men who raised the flag were
black. He angrily said that Lee should “shut his face.” Lee
responded that Eastwood was acting like an “angry old
man,” arguing that, despite making two films about Iwo
Jima back to back, “there was not one black soldier in both
of those films,” and adding that he and Eastwood were “not
on a plantation.” Lee later claimed that the media
exaggerated their exchange and that he and Eastwood had
effected a reconciliation through their mutual friend Steven
Spielberg, which culminated in him sending a print
of Miracle at St. Anna to Eastwood.

After the
tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Lee circulated a
message on used Twitter including the home address of the
shooter George Zimmerman. The address turned out to be
incorrect, forcing the real occupants, Elaine and David
McClain, to stay at a hotel due to numerous death
threats. Lee later issued an apology and reached an
agreement that reportedly included financial compensation,
with their attorney stating “The McClains’ claim is fully
resolved”. Nevertheless, the next year the McClains filed a
negligence lawsuit that accused Lee of “encouraging a
dangerous mob mentality among his Twitter followers, as well
as the public-at-large.” The lawsuit, which a court filing
reportedly valued at $1.2 million, alleged that the couple
suffered “injuries and damages” that continued up until
Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013, but the judge dismissed it,
agreeing with Lee that the issue had already been
settled.

Given today’s overheated political climate, it is
easy to understand why this year’s Cannes Film Festival jury
decided to make a political point by awarding
BlacKkKlansman the Grand Prix and gave Lee a
six-minute standing ovation. A standard police procedural,
Lee’s usual cinematic exuberance is only really evident in
Alec Baldwin’s provocative opening prologue, which is neatly
bookended by horrific footage from last year’s
Charlottesville alt right rally and Trump’s disgusting
response. For the rest of its two hour and fifteen minute
running time, BlacKkKlansman remains a measured, even
sedate exercise in classic narrative movie-making. Tonally,
however, the film is a post-modern melange of dramatic and
action scenes, alternating with episodes of grim humour and
ironic foreshadowing, and intentionally reminding audiences
that the struggle against racism in the US is far from a
done deal. Lee and his co-writers moved the story back seven
years from when it actually took place in 1979 to 1972,
which allowed them to refer both to blaxploitation movies
and Nixon’s re-election campaign, which the Klan actively
supported.

John David Washington (Denzel’s son) and Adam
Driver put in stellar performances in the lead roles, while
singer and long-time civil rights activist Harry Belafonte
provides a stirring cameo that is drenched in authenticity.
Washington has revealed that, just before the gun shooting
scene was filmed, Lee told him the metal “running
nigger” targets were not props, but legally purchased on
the internet. As in many of his previous outings, Lee’s
longtime collaborators (especially editor Barry Alexander
Brown and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard) provide
delicate, nuanced, and unobtrusive touches. There are not
too many cinematographers who know how to light black actors
successfully, but Chayse Irvin does a highly impressive job.
This is Lee’s first film since Oldboy to be shot on
35mm film and it shows in the rich grain and texture of his
imagery. Both Marci Rodgers’ wardrobe selections and Cathy T
Marshall’s set dressing precisely evoke the period setting,
and Lee’s musical ear remains as true as ever, particularly
during a club scene that perfectly captures the joyful sense
of freedom and release that can only be found on the dance
floor. The end credits are accompanied by a previously
unreleased live rehearsal recording of Prince singing
Mary, Don’t You Weep.

It has been over fifty years
since Malcolm X first decried brainwashed negroes bragging
about their blackness. More than half a century has passed
since he described the widespread feeling of cultural grief
and depression among blacks as a form of self-hatred. As the
British father of a bi-racial and West Indian
African-American who spent much of my working life toiling
deep inside the putrid entrails of Tinseltown, I certainly
have some personal “skin in the game,” to cite just one
ironic line from Lee’s deftly astute screenplay. I must
confess to finding the contortions and contradictions in
these recent debates among black intellectuals about how
best to combat institutional racism and white supremacism
somewhat baffling – and perhaps that’s simply as it should
be.

I can only observe, with some degree of paternal
pride, that my gay son seems to have matured into a
remarkably successful and well-adjusted individual. In large
part, his self-confidence, assurance, and surprising sense
of ambition is due to the support and engagement of several
influential mentors, both black and white, for which I will
always be profoundly appreciative. It may be a truism, but
it seems to me that our only hope for progress in so many
problematic social and political arenas these days lies in
the inspiring clarity and vision of our youth. In this
terrifying age of impending environmental catastrophe, with
a mendacious and racist misogynist in possession of the
nuclear codes, we must trust in the sanity and sincerity of
our children to de-escalate the discussion and at least try
to maintain the conversation on a courteous, civil, and
mutually respectful basis. In the end, what other hope do we
have?

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