This summer audiences had the opportunity to contrast two films by Black directors addressing the role of the police. One, Sorry to Bother You, by first-time director Boots Riley, who proudly calls himself a communist, accurately depicts the cops attacking striking workers trying to keep out scabs. The police are friends of the company, not the workers. This social satire addresses alienation and wage slavery, collective versus individual advancement, the need for militant strikes and multi-racial unity, and the role of the state (especially the police) in protecting the owners’ profits. This is communist art, one that helps us understand and fight capitalist exploitation.
The other film, BlacKkKlansman, is by veteran director Spike Lee, who was recently paid $219,000 by the New York Police Department(NYPD) to help develop a program to build closer ties between the NYPD and Black and Latino residents, who will never forget “New York’s finest” many racist killings: Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Ramarley Graham, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, Eleanor Bumpurs, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, Saheed Vassell and many others. Lee’s art distorts reality and offers a mythical view of the police as people who risk their lives infiltrating and disrupting white supremacist groups.
KKKop investigated PLP
Lee’s film is supposedly based on a memoir by Ron Stallworth, a former Colorado Springs detective who spent years infiltrating Black radical and communist groups, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Stallworth said in a recent interview:
“And I was actually running two investigations at once: the Klan investigation and an undercover investigation of the Progressive Labor Party. I’d bounce back and forth from one investigation to another” (Time, 8/9).Stallworth was part of the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro). Boots Riley has written a three-page critique of BlacKkKlansman, in which he accurately reports:
“Cointelpro’s objectives were to destroy radical organizations, especially Black radical organizations. Cointelpro papers also show us that when white supremacist organizations were infiltrated by the FBI and cops, it was not to disrupt them. It was to use them to threaten and/or physically attack radical organizations. … In some cases, it was the undercover cops who came up with plans and literally pulled the trigger on assassinations. . . That is what Ron Stallworth was helping to do.”
A few more lies:
Riley details how BlacKkKlansman is filled with distortions, including made-up scenes:
Stallworth and the Colorado Springs police never prevented a KKK bombing.
This was added to create suspense and make the police seem heroic.The scene in which a drunk white cop with a history of racist abuse is secretly recorded, and was then later arrested was entirely fabricated. Lee wants us to believe that most police care about racism. But in the real world, police embrace a “blue wall of silence” that protects cops who regularly brutalize Black, Latin and white workers.
Stallworth could speak on the phone with KKK leaders, but as a Black man, he obviously couldn’t show up at Klan meetings. A white cop (played by Adam Driver) went in his place. In the film, the partner is Jewish and is almost discovered by a suspicious Klan member, who would have reacted violently. In real life, the cop was not Jewish.Once again, Lee made this up to exaggerate the risks to the police.
The film also creates the character of Patrice, the leader of the Black Student Union at Colorado College. She is initially appalled when she learns that Stallworth is an undercover cop. Yet in one of the final scenes, Patrice and Ron walk down the hall together, guns drawn, to confront a burning cross.
The message is clear: cops and anti-racist activists should be allies in the fight against racism.  
Do the right thing? Art serves the ruling Class agenda
Riley correctly points out that Lee devoted his storytelling talent to altering the facts into a piece of art that defends the racist capitalist state, making the cops look like heroes and anti-racist allies of the working class. Riley describes Lee’s lionization of the cops as “really disappointing, to put it mildly.” Spike Lee depicted police violence negatively in 1989’s Do The Right Thing, honoring the names of police-murder victims such as Eleanor Bumpers. Some workers may have seen him as a rebel. But the film industry serves to build up capitalism, not make meaningful criticism of it.
 Lee has been part of that industry for a long time now and his payday from the NYPD makes it even more inevitable that he will produce narratives that prop up the status quo and seek to win more youth and Black workers to support the state apparatus, specifically the police. We must see this film as part of the conditioning the state imposes on us to see the police as our saviors, starting when Officer Friendly visited our kindergarten. As communists it is our duty to rip the hood off films that attempt to use identity and fake progressive politics, to feed us the bosses crappy anti-comunist, and anti-workers culture.