“You have the emergence in human society of this thing that’s called the state. What is the state? The state is this organized bureaucracy: it is the police department; it is the army, the navy; it is the prison system, the courts, and what have you. This is the state, it is a repressive organization, but the state - ‘And gee, well, you know, you’ve got to have the police, because if there were no police, look at what you’d be doing to yourselves! You’d be killing each other if there were no police!’ - but the reality is, the police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got.”
— Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, as sampled in dead prez’s “Police State”
Spoilers and serious topics ahead.
BlacKkKlansman is the story of Detective Ron Stallworth, who as a rookie investigator in the Colorado Springs Police Department infiltrated the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. This ambitious move was achieved by having Stallworth talk to the Klansmen on the phone, even managing to have multiple conversations with David Duke, and a white officer attend functions as his proxy. While Detective Stallworth is pretty clearly depicted as the hero of the story, director Spike Lee having outright voiced for police systems as a matter of principle, the film inadvertently displays through its ing characters and important plot sequences that reform of and through the police is not a viable option.
The most salient arguments against the police come from the love interest, Patrice, who is the Black Student Union chapter president at Colorado College. Throughout the film, she holds a consistent contempt for the police and the state broadly for its weaponization against civil rights protests and overstaffing in Black communities, rejecting simple reforms within the liberal state as said state was established within a framework of white supremacy. Early on in the film, a BSU event takes place, in which Kwame Ture delivers a ionate speech against police brutality and encouraging his audience to practice self-defense in the face of being terrorized by cops. Shortly after the speech, Ture and Patrice are pulled over by Andy Landers, another officer of CSPD, who during the stop sexually assaults Patrice, threatening that if Ture is not gone the next day they will be murdered — it is revealed later that Landers killed a Black child on a false pretense, but the matter was covered up by the department due to an institutional cultishness around being “family”. Landers is not the only racist cop, and an important plot point especially early on in the film is how Stallworth is bothered by the use of the slur “toad” as well as more subtle microaggressions by other officers (i.e. “C’mon, you know you want some of that” when discussing a white actress Stallworth respected) when asking him for files on Black suspects and offenders while he was working in the records room.
In the final segment of the movie, Patrice and Ron are at home discussing his resignation from the Klan and her maintained principle of not being able to hold a relationship with a police officer before the film pans to a cross burning outside their apartment complex. The Klansmen chanting “Blood and Soil” transitions to footage of the 2017 Charlottesville riot, starting with the “White Lives Matter — Jews will not replace us” march and cutting to the car attack, which killed Heather Heyer and injured numerous others. To conclude, here is the final chorus of the aforementioned dead prez track: “The average Black male lives a third of his life in a jail cell because the world is controlled by the white male, and the people don’t never get justice, and the women don’t never get respected, and the problems don’t never get solved, and the jobs don’t never pay enough, so the rent always be late. Can you relate? We living in a police state.”
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