by Murtada Elfadl

There’s a loaded line that Spike Lee has to navigate with BlacKkKlansman. The line is between entertaining the audience while being faithful to the crazy but true story of Ron Stallworth and making a credible and incendiary link between the bigotry and systematic oppression that has always existed and our current wretched circumstances in this country. For the most part he is successful.

The stranger than fiction story from the 1970s is about a rookie cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) in Colorado Springs, who pretended  to be white on a lark and called the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He was so believable as a racist white man on the phone, that he convinced his superiors to let him lead a broader investigation to infiltrate the Klan. He was helped by his Jewish partner Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) who “played” him when meeting with the Klan...