Warning: Please be warned that in the following blog post I describe in detail the early twentieth century lynching of Jessie Washington.
Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of black Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth’s operation to infiltrate and expose a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). To fool them over the phone into believing he’s white he performs their version of racism and gains the trust of Klan leader David Duke. For in-person meetings Stallworth enlists the help of Jewish officer Flip Zimmerman to be his white public face, a job which places him in harm’s way when Klan members suspect his Jewish heritage.
Vox‘s Alyssa Wilkinson closes her negative review of the film with a searing indictment of its racial politics. Rather than provoke white audiences’ discomfort and critique their complacent brand of liberal color-consciousness, Wilkinson argues the film is “just so obvious that it leaves room for a ponderously predictable net effect. BlacKkKlansman reinforces what we’re already angry about. And it makes us feel glad that we, at least, see through the pathetic lies.” Noel Ransome of Vice similarly excoriates the film for letting “white audiences in on a joke, while failing to demand reflections on that joke.” Leaving the theater disappointed, Ransome heard “white guys laughing as we huddled through those double doors, with me, the black dude, feeling like I whiffed some bullshit.”
It must be frustrating to enter a theater, excited to bear witness to a blistering take down of the KKK–America’s premier racist invention–only to interpret their real life cinematic counterparts as little more than comic foils to heroic police officers. I can see how Lee’s film may seem problematic on the surface. It appears to hoist a version of respectability politics on its black audience members whenever a good cop enters the frame to counteract the overtly racist bad ones. In his three-page critique of BlacKkKlansman, Sorry To Bother You director Boots Riley famously argued that, in contrast to Lee’s earlier work, the film has a deeply problematic pro-law enforcement bent, even inventing Jewish officer Zimmerman to manipulatively play off of the audience’s sympathies. He additionally accuses Lee of revising history to suit a white supremacist agenda, pointing out that the real-life version of the film’s police officer protagonist, Ron Stallworth, infiltrated and sought to destabilize black radical organizations that fought to undermine racist hate groups like the KKK.
The critics above are also troubled by the film’s post-production-added coda featuring a montage of carnage from the Charlottesville, Virginia protests stoked by non-KKK-affiliated racist agitator Richard Spencer when he sought to obtain permits to hold his Unite the Right rally on the University of Virginia campus. The nation stood bewildered later that day when president Donald Trump made his bizarre concession that protesters on both sides–anti-racist and racist alike–are equally to blame, despite white supremacist James Fields having rammed his car into a cluster of protesters and claimed the life of Heather Heyer. Given who the heroes of the film are, the coda may feel to some like it venerates the very culture of policing that failed protesters like Heyer, to whom Lee dedicated his film.
But these critical reviews of BlacKKKlansman too quickly chide Lee for taking creative liberties with the original historical source material and sanitizing it for white audiences. There is one vital problem with such deference to historical authenticity. It matters more how and what Lee revises than that he makes revisions in the first place. After all, history is not a neutral document of the past. Those who wield it can choose to use it to build coalitions, teach powerful lessons, destabilize social hierarchies, or reconstruct those hierarchies. In the case of BlacKkKlansman Lee only revises something to subvert it. For instance, it is true Zimmerman is fictional, yet his presence and role in the film is a necessary call for coalition between black people and Jews. Through Zimmerman and Stallworth we witness a shared history of being on the receiving end of hate–the core difference being that Zimmerman can leverage his whiteness to play his part effectively. One pivotal scene illustrates this difference. Zimmerman tells Stallworth he refuses to risk his life “to prevent some rednecks from lighting a couple sticks on fire” because for Stallworth “it’s a crusade. For me, it’s a job.” After accusing Zimmerman of cowering behind his fake white Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity, Stallworth reminds him that American racism is “our problem.” It is a powerful statement against complacency, of the urge to sit in the shadows and wait for American culture to move beyond its racist past and present. In intersecting Stallworth and Zimmerman’s shared oppressions, the film demands a black-Jewish coalition. Painful though it is to confront, like Stallworth Zimmerman’s life was already at risk before he entered the ranks of the KKK.
As for the film’s dubious depiction of heroic police officers, Lee himself defended his film in an interview with The Times, claiming his films have
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 colour. I’m not going to say that. I mean, we need police. Unfortunately, police in a lot of instances have not upheld the law; they have broken the law. But I’d also like to say, sir, that black people are not a monolithic group.
August 24, 2018
Despite initially refusing to confront Riley’s criticism, Lee here attempts to make a case for abandoning the all-or-nothing thinking characteristic of our increasingly polarized culture. Lee asserts, somewhat questionably, that we err in supposing, as his critics do with black people, all officers are part of a monolithic group. I confess the equivalence here gives me pause. Riley and other critics understandably wince at BlacKkKlansman‘s model for what good police officers look like. To be sure, our contemporary culture of policing is beset by a deep-rooted psychology of racism that leads some officers to extinguish innocent black lives for nothing more than existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Other officers unwittingly fall victim to the racism threaded in America’s social fabric. If police officers are going to exist on the streets and in our institutions whether we like it or not, perhaps the answer to the problem of police brutality is to demand more from police. What does a good officer look like? How might we go about changing the culture of policing so officers better serve the most under-served among us?
Another refrain in all these critiques, both implied and explicit, is that BlacKkKlansman is too obvious or heavy-handed to be subversive. In its whimsical historical revisions, the argument goes, the film too often depicts its villains as absurdist and bumbling inversions of the genuine article as opposed to the real threats they continue to be, and therefore the film’s racial politics are muddied by its own absurdities.
But it’s in that very obviousness, that heavy-handedness, where Lee stages the film’s most persuasive anti-racist polemic. Consider the film’s centerpiece that glues the whole experience together, and which all the critics above mostly overlook. It’s a scene featuring Jerome Turner (played by singer and activist Harry Belafonte), another invented character who acts as the audience’s window into a horrifying past that could easily become the present. Turner tells of the brutal early twentieth-century lynching of Jessie Washington in Waco, Texas. The scene cross-cuts between two social gatherings. On one side the elderly Turner emotionally recounts Washington’s lynching from his vantage as an eighteen-year-old black boy witnessing it from the attic of a nearby building. Black men and women, some of them holding blown-up photographs of Washington’s lynching, surround Turner in rapt attention as though absorbing an important history lesson.
On the other side Klan leader Duke prepares an initiation ceremony prior to a celebratory screening of Birth of a Nation, the infamous D.W. Griffith-directed yarn that depicts the knights of the KKK as heroic saviors of America from power-hungry and idiotic black people. During that pre-screening baptism, Zimmerman waits patiently as Duke travels toward him down a line of kneeling Klan members and, one-by-one, splashes holy water on each of their robes. Zimmerman takes off his hood when Duke reaches him and stares at him with a mixture of fear, contempt, and sadness. We know he only begrudgingly accepts his initiation. Zimmerman, a Jew who passes as white, is a liminal figure. A target of the Klan’s racism himself, Zimmerman performs racism suitably, yet his watery, reluctant eyes threaten to betray that performance. He cheers during Birth of a Nation at its fantasy destruction of black men and boos alongside his Klan allies when black characters in the film seem to gain the upper hand. All the while, we sympathize with his necessary performance and wince whenever he pumps his fists to the film. We don’t envy his awful mission.
That film, after all, is credited with resurrecting the KKK during a time of already heightened racial tensions. It teaches the very lessons that led to Washington’s lynching a century ago. Indeed, few American films are as illustrative of the potent rhetoric of Jim Crow-era racism. For all its early cinematic innovations and breathtaking scope, Birth of a Nation inculcates the long existing Civil War and post-reconstruction-era stereotypes of the criminal black man–the freed slave buck–who rapes and murders white women.
One scene from the film is a particularly vile example of such stereotypes. It depicts an actor in blackface pursuing a white woman who repeatedly rebuffs his advances. After a short chase he corners her at a cliff side. With nowhere to run, she hurls herself over the edge, her body crashes against the rocks below, and she later dies. Her pursuer gets captured by the KKK, put on trial, found guilty, lynched, and left on a doorstep with a sign around his neck reading “KKK.” BlacKkKlansman instructs that the consequences of this scene–the lynching and its aftermath–are the only moments of truth, and so they are the only moments we are allowed to witness. By contrast, Birth of a Nation teaches its spectators that black men are scheming criminals, and white women are little more than meek and powerless victims of black men’s voracious sexual appetites.
BlacKkKlansman inverts these stereotypes and frames racist white women as willing agents who collude in others’ oppression. After waiting quietly in another room while their husbands undergo the ceremony, Duke finally invites the women into the venue. As Birth of a Nation plays, it’s the white women’s alternating cheers and boos that can be heard most audibly over the film’s racist imagery. Anytime a black man or woman is on-screen, their voices rise above the din to express disgust. When Klan members appear, their voices become part of a cheering chorus. They are not meek and powerless, but like their husbands, participate in racist destruction. They teach the same lessons they consume.
At this moment the scene cuts to Turner, who points to Washington’s lynching photographs held by the black women flanking him. Birth of a Nation, Turner says, came out the year before the mob murdered Washington. It empowered white supremacists and even captured the attentions of then-President Woodrow Wilson, who called the film “history written with lightning.” Turner utters President Wilson’s quote with a sardonic smile, showing his recognition that artists like Griffith bear the responsibility of distorting history to teach the wrong lessons.
This prolonged and complex scene juxtaposes two dueling pedagogies–one based on a violently stereotypical artifact of white supremacy and the other provoking a kind of mournful rage at the racist consequences of that hate. One is a piece of early twentieth-century cinematic history that resurrected the very hate group at the center of Lee’s new, twenty-first century cinematic response. The other is a lecture designed to heal the wounds inflicted by such cinema. Taken together, the scene mounts BlacKkKlansman‘s most persuasive argument that anti-racist pedagogy means asking students to bear witness, to see the obvious, to look upon the most odious features of our past and present. As spectators, we’re forced to confront the violence inflicted by Birth of a Nation and its racist acolytes, and Washington’s lynching is the most apt symbol of that violence. Well-documented in high-quality photographs, Washington’s burnt remains countermand a crowd of white racist celebrants cheering “white power.”
But the white racists don’t get the last word. The scene finally cuts to the black women surrounding Turner, chanting “black power” in unison, their coalition standing in stark contrast to such antithetical hate. Lee’s extended focus on the mostly-female students is no accident. Turner may have been the lecturer, but it is the black women who literally bear that photographic evidence.
It is worth considering some of those photographs in relationship to this scene as a core component of anti-racist pedagogy, as a means of bearing witness to events from which we may feel compelled to avert our gaze.
An old black-and-white long-shot photograph shows a large crowd huddled around a desiccated tree–a sea of white boater hats tilted toward the spectacle at the center. Small wisps of smoke blow from the base of the tree toward the eastern edge of the image and obscure a blurry mass of individuals in motion. One man seems to be stoking the flames with a stick, while another hunches over the blackened pyre as if to study it.
One could easily mistake the scene as an innocent depiction of a town gathering in celebration around a bonfire. The graininess of the early twentieth century photograph could almost make one overlook the fetal mass–a human–splayed across the burning embers, their head bent beyond view, their left leg, flayed and blackened by fire, extended over the boundary of the planter box surrounding the tree. The new detail suddenly paints a different portrait. The man in a light boater hat isn’t holding a stick, but a rope, and the man to his right isn’t studying the fire, but gleefully ingesting his and the mob’s brutal work. Another close-up photograph of the horrifying scene shows the gnarled and charred mass strung up against a low branch of the tree, the poor boy’s bones exposed, legs cut off at the knee, head tilted ever so slightly, face unrecognizable. A mob of white men in the background don self-assured grins.
The story doesn’t begin or end there. After Waco local Lucy Fryer was found bludgeoned to death in the doorway of her house, officers discovered Washington nearby the scene. Washington was a mere seventeen years old at the time when those officers gained his trust and promised to protect him from lynch mobs in exchange for a confession. Uneducated, illiterate, incapable of defending himself, and fearing for his safety, Washington confessed to the crime. Word and image can hardly do justice to what followed. Within three minutes an all-white jury found Washington guilty of murdering Fryer and sentenced him to death. Only seconds after the jury delivered its verdict a mob of 2,000 white men dragged Washington from the courtroom in chains, beat him mercilessly, stabbed him, and dragged him to the tree at the town square, where 15,000 spectators watched as they cut off his testicles, burned him alive, and amputated his fingers and toes to sell as souvenirs. Those white men then dismembered the body, bagged the parts, and paraded them around town. Waco’s mayor called in local photographer Fred Gildersleeve to document the event. He was more than happy to turn a profit on the lynching postcards they would be made into.
Looking intently at the photographs and reading articles that recount the tragedy cannot possibly capture the dense racism permeating Washington’s motionless remains and the self-satisfied smiles of the vengeful white men in the background. Instead, one can only force, as BlacKKKlansman does, such images back into our cultural memory so that we can bear witness to events that we must never forget. As Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith argue in their book Lynching Photographs, the photograph’s evidence “cannot be fixed” in time, but “is determined by context and circulation and the interests of certain viewers.” In planting the photographic evidence within cinema, as a counter-cinema to that which Birth of a Nation long ago inspired, white viewers must confront their own inaction in the face of obvious racist hatred. Establishing a new repertoire, an emotional performance in the vein of Turner, resurrects photographic evidence that was once sold for profit to hungry consumers. Perhaps our new context, the polished cultural lens through which we read such photographs, is our collective horror. Perhaps the obviousness is the point.
Reflecting now on Lee’s film and the photographic evidence of Washington’s lynching it inspired me to write about, I confess I’m at a loss, as an educator myself, for how to incorporate Turner’s transformative pedagogy into my own classrooms. Would a mere trigger warning justify displaying these still images of incomprehensible evil? Do I risk subjecting my black students to unnecessary trauma? Or is forcefully confronting that trauma a necessary precondition for social change? I labor to build coalitions in my classrooms, yet I’m also constantly aware of the rash choices my whiteness affords me.
Having revisited this scene over and over, I’m struck by Turner’s soft cadence, his calculated, ironic smile, his simultaneous wistfulness and candor. He occupies that throne not to exert control over his rapt spectators, but to report from personal experience and build community through storytelling. Perhaps my role as an instructor is not as Turner, but as a member of that audience, sinking into the background, listening more and speaking less.