White or Black, Same Common Future

Rating: 10/10 (6 November 2018)

This film is a masterpiece, not in what it tells us about the KKK and the fact that white supremacists are nothing but neo-Nazis and neo-KKKlanners. We know all that. But it shows how racism is ingrained in American "culture", meaning "white culture" so deep that it will never be able to drop out completely. At the same time the film is just as clear as crystal about the fact that this racism, I mean anti-black racism, is just so ingrained in American "black culture" that it will never be able to be eradicated. Racism in white culture is about blacks being apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas, the impossibility to be truly free and superior as the white race as long as these black monsters will exist. The same racism in black culture is the belief that blacks are inferior and will never be equal, that they have to be subservient, obedient and submissive to the superiority of the whites, in short, that blacks are not even half human, they just are not human at all. Live with these two racisms when you are a black man in the white society of the USA.
The second thing you will love is that the language of the KKK in the 70s under Nixon is exactly the same as that of the white supremacists of Charlottesville, 2017. It centers on "America first," "make America great again," "USA first" and other ridiculous self-centered and self-locked-up white blindness about the world today and the future of today, not of a century ago, and even a century ago such motto would be absurd.
For the younger generation, it is a good way to discover what the Civil War was, from the Confederate side, what racism and segregation were all along till even today. The film is yet rather tame on the lynching episode. We get words, a description, and two or three black and white images, but the lynching itself is not shown like the cavalcade of Southern Klanners riding on their horses across the city and capture the black man they had decided to broil, grill, dismember, disembowel and hang, burn plus a few other things tonight. I guess that is not possible on a film from Hollywood if the film does not want to be X-rated.
But what's left after that? A vision of the rhetoric of the Black Panthers via Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, two or three mentions of Angela Davis (who I met in 1973 in Davis California), some development on the black revolution that was announced by the Black Panther Party leaders at the time, a small book entitled "Black is Beautiful" going along with the mirror image of it under the title of "White is beautiful." The same way White Power is asserted by the KKK and just in continuation of it Black Power is asserted by the BPP. Things have changed even if some nostalgic people want to bring back those old days that have normally been buried with the defeat in Vietnam and subsequent decades. If you do not believe it has, just listen to Barack Obama in Obama ANTI-TRUMP Speech at EXPLOSIVE Rally in Gary, Indiana, on YouTube. Things have changed because no matter what the white nationalists and white supremacists lost in the bogs of nostalgia may think, the 44th president of the USA was black and he was in the White House from 2009 to 2017. That has changed the texture of the USA and that new texture cannot be changed, even by the worst liar of any time
But keep in mind the KKK shown in this film is at the end of its existence, of its lifespan. Other films about what it was in the 1950s and 1960s like Mississippi Burning would show the real horror of what it was then before the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King marched onto Washington DC. That was the nightmare that prompted the dream of MLK and that dream was also the American dream, even if slightly more colorful than the traditional dream of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacists who were and still are now and then aggressive hornets more than plain domestic wasps.
Enjoy the vision of the nightmare made scary again in Charlottesville.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU