"BlacKkKlansman" and Fighting the Rise of Racism in the Trump Era // Spike Lee: ‘This guy in the White House has given the green light for the Klan'

By Dilip -
See Trevor Noah interview Spike Lee:
Spike Lee - "BlacKkKlansman" and Fighting the Rise of Racism in the Trump Era

Spike Lee: ‘This guy in the White House has given the green light for the Klan'

The director’s award-winning new film is the story of a black detective who went undercover with the KKK. He talks ‘wokeness’, vindication and Trump’s America
Spike Lee has heard all his film-making life that he is preoccupied with race. Sometimes the criticism has not come from obvious voices. Back in 2000, when Lee suggested that a lot of African American comedy and music – including gangsta rap – was not far removed from minstrel shows, the actor Jamie Foxx observed: “I think it’s getting to the point where nobody cares, because he talks about it so much that now he’s just become the angry guy, the angry black man.”

For a long time, Lee has been proposing an idea of America – that its stories should be told in the context of its violently racist past – that not everyone wanted to hear. In the present political moment, however, with the president that he calls Agent Orange in the White House, he is, obviously, unrepentant. People are rethinking films of his, he suggests, that they previously might have dismissed. And having mostly been ignored by the major award juries for the past 30 years, Lee, aged 61, is once again picking up prizes.

Often the criticism of his work has been coded. Two weeks ago, I mentioned to Lee in his studio office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, that, having read a selection of three decades’ worth of reviews and profiles before our interview, the description of him that surfaced most often was “provocateur”. That word sometimes seemed to be used as a euphemism for “uppity”.

“I can just about live with provocateur,” Lee says, weighing me up with his sparky, seen-it-all eyes from behind outsized, orange-framed glasses (in person he is anything but angry – considered, thoughtful, quick to laugh). “The one that gets me is ‘controversial’ – ‘the controversial director.’” 

He dislikes the tag because it suggests he sets out only to shock. Mostly, Lee believes, over the course of more than 40 films – beginning in bravura style with the liberating She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 and continuing through Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X and Clockers and Miracle at St Anna – he has simply been telling it like it is... read more (trailer inside)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/29/spike-lee-interview-blackkklansmen-film



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