Movies and Philosophy Now: BLACKkKLANSMAN: Overcoming Racism and the Real War on Stupidity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON AUGUST 31, 2018
There will be some spoilers.

BlacKkKlansman was based on a true story from the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth. In 1972 Stallworth became the first black detective at the Colorado Springs police department. Stallworth requested to go undercover after being stuck working in the records room for longer then he'd hoped, while being mistreated by his co-workers. He ended up going to a local rally to listen to a national civil rights leader, observe and report back to his department if there was any illegal activity. Stallworth met Patrice, a president of the black student union at Colorado College at the rally, and decided to get to know her and get in deeper undercover but nothing nefarious is ever found so the investigation was dropped.

Stallworth, now part of the intelligence division, recruited his Jewish co-worker, Flip Zimmerman, to help him infiltrate the local Klu Klux Klan chapter. Stallworth gets invited to join the KKK after a couple of phone calls, pretending to be white, with the president of the Colorado Springs chapter. Flip, acting as a white Stallworth, goes and meets with them in person while Stallworth maintains contact with them by phone.

Stallworth and Flip get in good with these KKK guys and eventually in a position to meet the Grand Wizard of the KKK himself, David Duke. Stallworth ends up saving his now girlfriend Patrice from being killed by a bomb haphazardly planted by one of the more radicalized KKK member's wife. Stallworth is congratulated by the chief but is told to destroy all his files on the investigation. Later at his apartment, Stallworth and Patrice are interruption and see in the distance, through a window, a flaming cross surrounded by Klan members.

BlacKkKlansman, given its serious subject matter, is quite funny in places, if not absurd. Director, Spike Lee likely wanted that absurdity present as a reflection of the madness of the film's very subject, which loosely is; 'what the fuck is going on in this country!!'.

Albert Einstein's, General Theory of Relativity, his geometric theory of gravitation was published in 1915, promising a new understanding of the Nature of Reality and what betterment is possible for the human race to advance forward into the future. Sadly that was also the same year D.W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation was released to the public to see just how backwards we've become. The film was responsible for the 20th century's resurgence of the Klan, glorifying them and promoting white supremacy. The racist film was widely received and in fact screened at the White House.

This juxtaposition in BlacKkKlansman between Grand Wizard David Duke and his fellow Klansman bombastically rejoicing over a screening of The Birth of a Nation, while in another location the black student union body listen to Harry Belafonte, with a heavy-heart, telling the account of a black farmhand named Jesse Washington, who was brutally lynched and burnt to death in front of 10,000 spectators, with children and policemen among them in Waco, Texas on May 15, 1916.

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."

-Benjamin Franklin

I know this may sound trite but racism is stupid. What I mean by this is racism couldn't hold up to reason and logic and hope to make it out the other side. Racism is pure ignorance fueled by historical traditions and an over all lack of understanding. What I mean by a lack of understanding, I don't mean a lack of understanding of a particular ethnicity or culture, what I mean is an overall inability to understand, to comprehend one's thoughts and have an ability to form constructive ideas out of those thoughts.

This is where the problem of racism and why it sticks around even though at this point in human history, we should have all moved on. Racism isn't about hating other people that may or may not be like you. Racism, at it's core, is a lack, or outright absence, of education and emotional intelligence. Telling a racist to stop being a racist is an act of futility. Racist are like villains, they don't see themselves as the bad guy. In their ignorant, backward minds they believe that they are in the right, and this brings us back to stupidity.

"America would never elect someone like David Duke for President of the United States."

- Ron Stallworth

The white supremacist Charlottesville rally in Virginia that happened on August 11th and 12th of 2017 was an obvious low point in the recent history of the United States. President Trump would have us all believe, certainly based on his long overdue statement, that there were bad people on both sides and some good people on both sides. (talk about taking a side by not taking a side) This doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to quite quickly come to the conclusion that the white supremacists were on the wrong side of this race battle, as the Confederates during the American Civil War were. This fight is never going to go away if we continue to tell or force white supremacist racists that they are wrong. That may be frustrating when you come to the realization that simply asking people to 'do the right thing' isn't going to be good enough. Doing the right thing is a relative proposition because the points of view of people often differ.

We do have a couple of ways to handle this seemingly endless problem. We could all divide, go our separate ways, chalk it up as 'this is what's best for everyone'. Or we can kill each other, fight back and forth, over and over again until we are all damn near dead. Or we do what they do at CERN. At the CERN facility in Switzerland there are hundred's of scientists and physicists from around the world, all working together to unlock the secrets of the universe both macro, micro and quantum. One of the issues that plague most of our world doesn't really happen there. The reason; they are beyond looking at people as categories. They look at people as brains that are in the bone case of their skull, past their skin color and cultural traditions.

I know, it's not that simple, but I'm here to say that it kind of is that simple because they are doing it. So why does racism persist even though we know how to overcome it, capitalism, lack of education? The problems we face runs far deeper than how we treat each other.

In half of the commercials on American television, corporations are selling drugs to unwitting people to 'help' solve all their problems. So how are people supposed to learn how to be intellectually honest with themselves about the problems that they face? If we become convinced, through conditioning and propaganda, that we 'need' our government to look after our safety and security and that we 'need' mega-corporations to look after our mental health and livelihood, then how are we going to learn to think for ourselves? If our leaders in office along with their corporate sponsors only want us to be dumb enough so we need them, then how are we going to be smart enough to know the difference? Racism is a side effect of our stupidity and ignorance not the source of it.

"Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

- Mark Twain

So now what, we go round and round and round? Historically through rallies and speeches, leaders of all sides of the opposition preached and pontificated about, how do we solve this mass division and all get along? We are all guilty of this because it is part of our defense mechanisms, where preconceived ideas and confirmation bias exist resulting in our brains dividing and filing away things, and often reducing people into heuristic categories for potentially later confabulations. My point here is we must look inwardly and understand more about our own thought processes, so we can understand more about how the people around us think the way they do.

This will not be easy, but other then killing each other, we have no choice but to learn how to understand ourselves so we can understand others. This is not condoning racists, this is about exploring an idea and rising above it to such a point that it's seen by all for what it is; stupid.