"BlackkKlansman"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

It’s not every day that an undercover cop successfully infiltrates a criminal organization by becoming one of them. After all, it must be hard. It’s got to be a real high wire act. I suppose that’s why they make movies about it.

But those old cop thrillers are downright pedestrian compared to what Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) of the Colorado Springs Police Department did back in the 1970s. He infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. He became a member! Also, by the way: He’s black.

This happened. Really. In real life. A black police officer joined the KKK.

But, actually, Stallworth starts his undercover work as a wire-wearing informant against, ironically, the Black Panthers. He attends rallies, talks to group leaders, and even cozies up to local-agitator-turned-love-interest, Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier). Stallworth is understandably conflicted about this project. He doesn’t seem fully on board with the Black Panthers’ agenda, but he does care about what they care about. And the racism he faces in, for example, in his own police department, is plenty to make him doubtful that the Black Panthers are merely the unhinged terrorist organization his superiors describe it as.

And it’s certainly no KKK! Whereas the Black Panthers assignment was given to Stallworth, surveilling the KKK is a project he sought out. He isn’t conflicted at all about taking them down.

What he does, seemingly of his own volition, is cold call the local KKK leadership (and, eventually, Grand Wizard David Duke himself) and establishes contact by telling them how honest-to-goodness racist he is. Name a non-white-protestant group—he professes to hate them all. It’s music to the KKK’s ears.

But then it’s time to meet them. Um. Problem. Black guy hanging with the KKK? Not really a thing. So Stallworth has to convince another cop, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who is Jewish but passes himself off as of purest Aryan descent, to be the in-person version of Ron Stallworth.

Talk about a high-wire act! What starts as a little poking and prodding quickly becomes some real deep doo-doo. The only question is, who’s it going to be on?

As for-real as this all seems, Stallworth is, interestingly, portrayed as a bit naïve. He hates racism, of course, and knows it’s a real problem. But throughout the movie—and especially in the beginning—he doesn’t take the KKK very seriously as a threat. He thinks they’re a joke. A really bad joke, to be sure, but more of a fringe sideshow. He doesn’t think they are a real force to be reckoned with, especially not at any national, political level.

So he laughs and he jokes about the KKK, and although he does take his work very seriously, when the prospect of nailing some of these baddies becomes real, it’s almost as if he thinks, well, that’ll be that—we’ll have settled this whole white nationalist racism stuff.

[Cough] Of course he’s wrong about that. But this is one of the more brilliant aspects of “BlackkKlansman”. It’s easy to see evil in the KKK. But it’s not always easy to see how deep, how widespread, and how dangerous that evil is in American culture. Even Stallworth, the very man who took on the KKK, can, it seems, underestimate his enemy—in certain circumstances, he can even see “both sides” of the conflict.

Both sides. Really good people. America first. Make America great again. These not so subtle allusions to contemporary politics are peppered throughout the movie. But the lack of subtlety here is also brilliant, I think. Director Spike Lee puts these things side by side, almost as if he’s holding up two photos for us to compare, and says, “Here” and “Here”—just look at this madness.

When Stallworth closes his case, it seems like he thinks, maybe even for just a moment, that the white nationalists are finished—that maybe, probably, the KKK and their ilk will fade into the uglier annals of human history.

45 years later, and here we are.