freeds

"Black KKKlansman" is based on the memoir of a black former cop. The job of police (black and white alike) is to keep workers and the oppressed in line on behalf of the owning class, with blacks at the bottom as a special target of state brutality from slavery on. While spying on the Klan in the '70s with the help of a white colleague, the black cop also infiltrated the multiracial, worker-oriented Progressive Labor group. Police historically disrupt progressive organizations, while generally protecting those of racists and fascists -- the rulers' reserve army. Over and over they cover for individual cop acts of racist brutality. How does Spike Lee handle these facts? He ignores his hero's work against PL and invents an episode in which the police department opposes a racist in its ranks.

The movie does show racism (still) rampaging, stoked by the rulers' present front man. Against this unavoidable truth, the filmmaker counterposes messages and protests rejecting hate. Their wishful moralizing is about as useful as a silk shirt against a bullet. Our defense depends not on cops, or mockery of the racists, or "love," but on the power of the multiracial working class.

A new rating is in order: This exciting entertainment for anti-racists should be viewed through class-reality lenses. Rita Freed

The story at the core of "Blindspotting" is powerful and perceptive on the trauma of racism. Exchanges of spoken word poetry between the two leads and kaleidoscopic visuals represent their inclusive, creative, violent native Oakland. Fantasy visions also partly cloak the implausible elements of the story, and illuminate the characters' psycho-social pain. But personal expression won't overcome race and class oppression, or prevent the corporate-tech-hipster takeover of Oakland. The film's real blindspot is the hole where a vision of creative collective action might have been. R. Freed

Reviews of this powerful, strongly-acted but partly blind film divide along predictable political lines. Many point out that the escalating violence of the bitter bereaved mother and the racist junior cop are writer-director-producer McDonagh's preferred style and are as unlikely as the relative saintliness of the "billboarded" police chief and other characters. These commenters deny U.S. society's racism, police brutality, homophobia, sexism and hostility to outsiders that the film reflects.

On the other hand, liberal reviewers applaud both its accurate echo of our daily headlines and its fairytale image of "common humanity" ending hate (despite all history to the contrary). The extreme social pathology of the U.S. has a material source: a rapacious, violent, world-striding system cloaked in hypocrisy. Only some awareness of this reality could ground a more believable narrative of characters driven to extremes.

R. Freed