BLACKKKLANSMAN

Directed by Spike Lee, written by Lee and Kevin Wilmott, starring John David Washington and Adam Driver.  

My impression after my several interviews with Spike Lee is of his genuine passion for educating today’s generation—white and black America alike—about the realities of racism in America. I say “educating” because he sincerely feels that his films are his “weapons” in that cause... As Gordon Parks has famously said, you choose your weapons; and as Parks’ weapons were his camera and pen, so too are Spike’s weapons his movies.

John Tibbetts with Gordon Parks

When Spike and I talked about his movie, Malcolm X, for example, he was dismayed that today his generation doesn’t know who Malcolm was, not even who Jackie Robinson was. That ignorance, he says, which is born of ignorance, complacency and narrow thinking, cannot stand.

Autographed painting of Spike Lee by John Tibbetts

Interesting, isn’t it?—that now his BLACKKKLANSMAN features Denzel Washington’s son , John David, in the role of the crusading policeman, Ron Stallworth? The distance from Denzel in MALCOLM X and John David in BLACKKKLANSMAN is not very far, is it?

John Tibbetts with Spike Lee

It is not surprising that one of the knocks against BLACKKKLANSMAN is the sledge-hammer indictment of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy in America, that it is more polemic than storytelling. Spike can’t help himself. But he’s right. There’s no room for subtlety in sequences like Belafonte’s recounting of the lynching in 1916 in Waco of Jesse Washington (a moving scene penned, I suspect by Kevin Willmott); and there’s no room for subtlety in Spike’s indictment, at the end, of the rancid racism festering today in Trump’s America.

Autographed drawing of Spike Lee by John Tibbetts

One can only hope that BLACKKKLANSMAN proves to be both the entertainment that Spike needs to reach his audiences, black and white, and the hammer-blow sermon that that same audience needs to confront and understand our own history. When the Jewish policeman (Adam Driver) admits that his involvement in the undercover operation of the Klan has caused him to reflect, for the first time, on his own Jewishness—one of the great moments in the movie—he is speaking for all of us who need to reflect, even if it’s for the first time, on our own complicity in the tensions of race in America.