![]() Linguistic passing also recurs in films like Justin Simien’s 2014 Dear White People and Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out. And Stallworth’s stand-in is not just any WASP cop his colleague Flip (Adam Driver) is a Jewish man whose need to deny his heritage to the Klan prompts introspection as to his own racial passing. In Larsen’s book, two black women pass as white to sidestep the racism of 1920s society. Passing, or presenting as another race (usually white) to escape discrimination, is a centuries-old practice crystallised in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing. He cannot enter his adversary’s world, and as such will never be able to truly understand him - or identify him on the other end of the phone. D’you ever notice that? It’s like ‘Are-uh… you gonna fry up that… crispy fried chicken, soul brother?’ĭuke’s dialogue is deeply racist, and Lee cuts through its heaviness by having Stallworth and his white sergeant, who is eavesdropping on the line, struggle to suppress their shared laughter.īut the exchange reveals something else: Duke cannot code-switch. A pure Aryan like you or I would pronounce it correctly: ‘are’. Stallworth: Can you give me any examples?ĭuke: Yeah, take the word ‘are’. Now, I can tell that you’re a pure, Aryan white man by the way you pronounce certain words. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, Blumhouse Productions, Legendary Entertainmentĭuke: I can always tell when I’m talking to a Negro.ĭuke: Yeah. Stallworth quickly distinguishes himself through his ability to code-switch between “black” and “white” dialects to manipulate, infiltrate and compromise power structures from within. In BlacKkKlansman, English is not one language but many. The film is both a pitch-perfect representation of the period, charting the parallel rises of the Black Power movement and the revised Ku Klux Klan under David Duke, and a deft indictment of Trump’s America. Lee’s mostly black protagonists can only make it in their racist surrounds when they know their own power, and how to use it.īut Lee’s latest film, BlacKkKlansman, suggests their most powerful weapon against racism may also be a commonplace one - the English language.īased on a true story, and set in 1970s Colorado Springs, BlacKkKlansman follows Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) as he becomes the city’s first black police officer and inflitrates the Ku Klux Klan. Ever since his 1989 film Do the Right Thing opened with Rosie Perez’s boxing-inspired dance to Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, Spike Lee’s cinema has been driven by the tensions between power and race in America.
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