Introduction: BlacKkKlansman, "On the Right Side of History"?

• Published in: Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 203 - 206
• Main Author: Letort, Delphine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 01.04.2022
• Subjects: Blaxploitation films; Hate speech; Humor; Intertextuality; Lee, Spike; Militancy; Motion picture directors & producers; Motion pictures; Police; Political activism; Politics; Power; Racism; Rhetoric; Social classes; Trump, Donald J; White supremacy; New York; United States > US
• DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.13.2.10.
• ISSN: 1536-3155

Loosely based on former police officer Ron Stallworth's recollections of his infiltration into the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018) exploits the paradoxical situation of its black author passing for a white supremacist to integrate the "Organization" as a powerful source of humor and critique. Director Spike Lee uses the autobiographical narrative as a source text to trace the roots of the Trumpian rhetoric in a history of nativist activism, embedded in the history and the images of Hollywood. BlacKkKlansman uses intertextual references to depict a racially divisive culture, which undergirds films that produce 'whiteness' and 'blackness' for antithetical audiences. Excerpts from The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W Griffith, 1915) and Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) underpin the mythology of white supremacy whereas those from Blaxploitation films nostalgically evoke the activist atmosphere of the Black Power era. Situated at the crossroads of black and white cinemas, BlacKkKlansman is a title that connotes the color line as a space of encounter and separation between two communities who find themselves trapped by a history of violence, which the film shows in its final photograph of Heather Heyer who died during a Black Lives Matter protest.