SPIKE LEE WANTS YOU TO WAKE UP
IT’S A PICTURE-PERFECT DAY ON MARTHA’S VINEYARD. Families stream by on a heavily foot-trafficked thoroughfare, while white men in cargo shorts dock their boats and crack open their beers. In the middle of it all is Spike Lee, sitting on a bench, delivering an earful of Saturday-afternoon real talk. “Agent Orange is in office,” he says. “If this isn’t a motivation to get off our asses and register to vote, I don’t know what is.”
It soon becomes clear why Lee picked this spot. He wants to talk about President Trump and Barack Obama and Colin Kaepernick and the Ku Klux Klan. But why do that in private when you could do it loudly, outside, for everyone to hear?
Lee is on the island to shoot scenes for the second season of his Netflix show She’s Gotta Have It, based on the 1986 film of the same name that launched his career. But he’s also a regular in the area, having built a house in Oak Bluffs in 1992 while making Malcolm X. Even though the Vineyard has deeply entrenched roots in black America, with black families sprinkled in every establishment I walk into on this late-July day, Lee still stands out.
It isn’t just his recognizable face. Lee is wearing a Mars Blackmon backpack (his iconic character from the original She’s Gotta Have It) and a hat that reads BLACKA, with each a replaced by a Klansman’s triangular white hood.
Spike Lee is a subversive walking advertisement for both Spike Lee and his new film, BlacKkKlansman, out Aug. 10. It premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix award, the second most prestigious prize of the event. Based on the early-1970s true story of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American detective to work for the Colorado Springs police department, the film centers on Stallworth (played by John David Washington) and a veteran Jewish cop (played by Adam Driver) as they find a unique, and risky, way to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
BlacKkKlansman is Lee’s most critically heralded and accessible effort in over a decade. The film represents another opportunity for one of society’s most distinctive voices to make a statement at a time when America’s politics on race and identity are at their most fractured in a generation. The film is also being released on the
