Episode 95: Greg Garrett on film and race

We often take for granted the role that film plays in shaping our cultural and racial awareness. Greg Garrett and George Mason discuss Spike Lee's film BlacKkKlansman, as well as other epic American films, Gone with the Wind and even the Big Lebowski, for the important conversations they inspire for people of all races.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: The movie by Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman shines a light on American racial history and even on our present. We'll be talking about the significance of that with Baylor University English professor Greg Garrett on Good God. Stay tuned.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith in public life. I'm your host, George Mason and I'm pleased to welcome to the program today Greg Garrett. Greg, good to have you with us.

Greg Garrett: It's such a pleasure, George. Thank you.

George Mason: Greg is a professor of English for the past 30 years at Baylor University and he has written widely but also taught not only on literature generally and writing but also on the subject of race and I think we're going to have a conversation in this episode, Greg, about race generally but also the fact that we have just concluded a morning here at Wilshire Baptist Church where you showed the film BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee and we had a fairly diverse group of people represented watching it and then having conversation about it, a remarkable film, really an emotionally power packed film, one that sheds light on our history as Americans.

George Mason: It really is a one of Spike Lee's most provocative and profound films, I think. Don't you think?

Greg Garrett: It absolutely is. And when the film came out, there was this critical consensus that formed rapidly around it, that it was Spike Lee at the very top of his gifts, not just as a storyteller and a filmmaker, but also as a provocateur because many of his films are intended to sort of hold up a mirror to American society and make us look at ourselves and see ourselves in ways that we don't normally want to think about ourselves. And that certainly what BlacKkKlansman does because it takes us into the sort of underbelly of white Christian nationalism, which is so powerful and dangerous right now in our culture and gives us a sense of the various sort of reasonable ideas that they have about why they're doing what they're doing and how they often actually co-opt elements of our faith as a way of making arguments for keeping white men, particularly, supreme.

Greg Garrett: And so it's an incredibly powerful film that as we were saying this morning also involves us emotionally to the extent that we may be able to get past the difficulty we sometimes have in thinking and talking about race.

George Mason: So this film is set in the 1970s and it's based upon a true story, although it's been broadly reinterpreted and characters placed in it and what not. But, on the other hand, you mentioned in the lead into it that while it is a period film, someone in a review made the comment that that period is always.

Greg Garrett: Right.

George Mason: Which is to say, as Faulkner said, the past is never past. That really this is a recurring theme in American history that is profoundly still with us that is unresolved. But it does feel in some ways like at least it is now something we can see. And this film helps us to see it anew, but it's out in the open and it's not nearly as undercover as it has been. Would you agree or disagree?

Greg Garrett: Absolutely. One of the things that the film does is it tells us that these recurring problems that we've had throughout American history are our problems. They're the problems that go to the heart of who we are as a people, and he uses history in thoughtful ways in the film to do that, he makes a lot of references to the 1915 epic Birth of a Nation, which has incredible emotional power, even to this day. I showed it last week to a graduate seminar at Baylor and even though I had warned my students in advance, they talked about how seductive the film is because of its cinematic power. And so we've got that film that reappears at different times during the course of BlacKkKlansman.

Greg Garrett: We've got a reference made to the history of the Klan, the organization as they call themselves in this film. And then we're told about the lynching that took place in 1916 in Waco, Texas. A very real event, which is narrated by a character played by Harry Belafonte in the film. And it's emotionally wrenching. And then we see some of the pictures from the lynching itself and we're just reminded, this is an ongoing issue at the heart of who we are. And if we don't confront it, it will continue. And that's why this is a movie that is a period movie. But as the critic said, the period is now, it's always.

George Mason: So, the movie begins with Gone With the Wind, a scene from Gone With the Wind. And you know, I think a lot of people view Gone With the Wind as this really epic movie that is just part of our American film history and all of that. But it really was quite deliberately part of the lost cause narrative, the sort of reinvention of the South and the sense of victimization that the South and white people experienced as a result of the Civil War. So that along with Birth of the Nation are part of the film history that that didn't just depict but also actually increased the racializing of American society, and the Jim Crow laws that come about and in our society and things of that nature. So film sometimes doesn't just reflect how things are, but it also then reinforces and supports a cause.

Greg Garrett: It can support ideologies that are already in place. And you and I talked about this on the dais during worship the last time I was here and the idea that we came up with, we formulated from the conversation we had about film last time and during worship was that film is one of our cultural artifacts that has mythic powers.

George Mason: Yes.

Greg Garrett: And when I use the word myth, I don't use it in a sort of a downgraded sort of way that we think of, "Oh, this is false and artificial." But in the way that we think of this as absolutely true. Even if you can't quantify it in a scientific way, myth is a way that people understand the world, and so what we talked about last time I was here, we said we need to identify the myths that are soul killing and claim and celebrate the myths that are life-giving.

George Mason: Yes.

Greg Garrett: And so these myths that are reflected in Birth of a Nation and mostly reflected through things like Gone with the Wind are powerful and dangerous racial stereotypes. So when black characters or people who are outside the white mainstream are represented, they were represented somehow as less than or other and there is this very clear hierarchal sense that's enforced in this story or in the story of Birth of a Nation where we have the myth of white superiority supported in a powerful artistic way. Yes. And, and so that's one of the dangers and one of the reasons that I started writing about film was because it seemed really important that we draw attention to things like Gone with the Wind.

Greg Garrett: Gone with the Wind is shown every summer during the film series at the Paramount in my native Austin. The beautiful classic picture palace. And it seems very important to me that when we see a film like that, we have to question it and ask about its context and ask how it can be reinforcing harmful things for us. So we've got to be conscious consumers of the media and the literature, the stories that are put in front of us.

George Mason: It would be easy, I think for us to view BlacKkKlansman as a Spike Lee joint, a film by Spike Lee, and therefore categorize it as a black film. And probably it's been seen, my guess, is more by black Americans than by white Americans because we easily might dismiss it as such. But this film is so deeply important, I think, for white people to see and come to grips with. In what ways do you think that's so?

Greg Garrett: Well, I think one of the things that it does for us, we talked about how Spike Lee holds up a mirror and he holds it up to the entire society. And one of the things that he often deals with is the fact that prejudice is not solely our provinces as white males. We get the most out of it. But it's something that we all wrestle with and to draw that to people's attention can be an important thing. He does that in some of the other films. But I think the most important thing about this film is how it weaves together the past story, the story is set in the 70s with our story that set in the present, and I'm always reluctant to reveal too much about the end of BlacKkKlansmen because it's such a powerful emotional experience.

Greg Garrett: But I would say that one of the most important things that happens to every viewer is this shock of recognition when they realize that we have moved from a story set in the past that we have been treating as fictional to our reality at this moment. When white supremacists walk the streets.

George Mason: Openly, without hoods.

Greg Garrett: Without hoods.

George Mason: Exactly. And carrying torches.

Greg Garrett: And the other thing I would say about why it's really important for a white audience to see this is that I think that this is a movie which is such a powerful emotional experience that it can break open people who have not been open to having the hard conversations about race and prejudice in this country.

Greg Garrett: When we talked about it while ago, there were powerful emotions all around the room and I was expressing plenty of them. But there's also this sense that because we have been cracked open in some way, something can enter into that, and we have this idea that maybe we will be more open to having these hard conversations, more open to acknowledging our responsibility as citizens in a racist society. I have showed this film often and I have never not shown it where people have not had first a powerful emotional experience and then really important conversation as a result of it. So I think that's what this film could launch.

George Mason: We were talking about the referentialism of the film with other films, the way Spike Lee brings in other genres of films and those sorts of things and we had lots of conversation about the blaxploitation films. For instance, the buddy films, the Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation. The one we didn't talk about that I think is so interesting and fascinating is the Big Lebowski. So here we have two characters, Walter and Donnie, who's not named in this film but played by Steve Buchemi's brother in the film.

Greg Garrett: That's true.

George Mason: And the Big Lebowski film is about mistaken identity, but it's also a kind of a cult white film you might say. And the fact that Spike Lee chooses to create these characters, to me this is sort of another way in for white people.

Greg Garrett: Oh, that's brilliant.

George Mason: In terms of looking at how some of us who might've seen that movie over and over again. We're like, "Oh, look what he's doing there. Oh, the mistaken identity. Oh, the braggadocia." All of this sort of thing that's going on in the white world. Amazing gesture, I think to bring everybody into the film.

Greg Garrett: And one of the things we talked about is that Spike Lee is an incredibly cinema literate person. He's part of this generation of film school trained directors. And he actually still teaches in the NYU film program. And so it would not surprise me any conscious reference. We had talked earlier about all of these different genres that he's using, and I think that any kind of access point that people can find in terms of stories they're familiar with. Because, even though I had read a little bit about the film when I saw it for the first time here in Dallas in 1918, I didn't know what to expect.

Greg Garrett: I knew it was a Spike Lee film and I was on board with that. But if you come in and you think, okay, well this is a historical story or a detective story or a buddy story. Okay. I've seen Lethal Weapon. I like Lethal Weapon. Well, I could probably sit and watch this. It does feel like he is making a way in for people based on their past movie experience.

George Mason: Yes. Well, I want to come back to this in the next segment because although I'd like to move beyond BlacKkKlansman, I think it's really important for us to talk a little bit about the technique of bringing the Jewish character into it and the whole concept of intersectionality that this film brilliantly invites us to consider as a result of that as well. So let's take a break and we'll come back and continue this conversation.

George Mason: The Good God program is a project of Faith Commons, a nonprofit organization I founded in 2018 to help promote the common good. Doing public theology across faith traditions and across racial and ethnic lines is an important thing in our communities. We hope you'll continue to enjoy Good God, but look at some of the other things we're doing also through Faith Commons www.faithcommons.org.

George Mason: We're back with Greg Garrett and we've been talking, Greg, about BlacKkKlansman, this brilliant Spike Lee film. It is a Spike Lee film but the screenplay was actually written by two Jewish screenplay writers. And I assume it's their invention to place a Jewish character in to the story that originally didn't have a Jewish character in it. The basic idea of course in Colorado Springs police department is an African American officer who finds a way to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. It's a remarkable story.

George Mason: It seems almost ridiculous, but it actually happened. But in the film, there's this decision to use as the sort of the plant in the Klan, a white character who is Jewish. So this really goes to something of this notion of what's called by sociologists now intersectionality. Can you talk about that a little bit generally, and what you think is happening in the film to help understand that concept?

Greg Garrett: And by intersectionality, are we talking about the sort of bifurcation that happens where people have to live one part of their life?

George Mason: Right. So there's this notion of intersectionality is a concept that seems to be more and more in racial studies and in social studies where we are coming to recognize that our identities have a kind of certain privilege in certain areas, but maybe not in other areas. And so for example, an African American male might have a sense of living with racial oppression on the one hand, but having a kind of privilege on the other hand, over African American females say for instance, or some such thing.

George Mason: So here we have a Jewish character who on the one hand has this privilege as a white character, but now set in this setting with the Klan is sort of alerted to his Jewishness and the fact that he's struggling with that identity that he hadn't struggled with before he gets into this. In other words, I think the whole concept is no matter where you are in the social system, you are never one thing or another. Even if you are a white Protestant person in America, there is a sense that you might've suffered abuse in your home growing up or you might have been working class or something of that nature. So we're coming to understand that we should all pay attention both to our privilege, but also to the ways that we can be sensitive to other people's struggles as well.

Greg Garrett: I think that was one of the great creative decisions. And I did have the privilege of interviewing David Rabinowitz, who was one of the two original writers working with Ron Stallworth on adapting his memoir. And there is a long and really interesting story attached to that. Ron basically trusted these guys who had never had a movie made, didn't sign a contract and just said, "If we ever get to this place, that would be awesome." And then they finished their screenplay, which did include that character of Phillip or Flip, and sent it to Jordan Peele, the director of Get Out. And he said, I know exactly who needs to make this movie and put it in the hands of Spike Lee. But David and his partner created this character who is at this intersection of being treated in a certain way if he embraces this piece of his identity and treated it in a certain way because he's never had to think about his identity.

Greg Garrett: But what the members of the Klan, particularly this really terrifying character named Felix keeps bringing up, keeps confronting him about if he's Jewish. And he literally is having to deny, deny, deny, deny.

George Mason: Three times, maybe?

Greg Garrett: Probably so. And so as he says in the movie, when the character of Ron who's played by Denzel Washington's son confronts him and says, "Why are you acting like you don't have skin in the game? You're Jewish." And he, during the course of the movie begins to realize that he has done this thing that some of the African American folks in our conversation this morning were saying, talking about passing. If you're a light skinned black person, you can pass and not have to deal with this part of your identity where you'll be held down and looked down on. And so it's a really brilliant thing that they've done in the movie.

Greg Garrett: But what I think the movie ends up doing with the character of Flip is he becomes fully himself because he's able to embrace that part of himself that he's denied for so long. And it actually takes him not to this place of prejudice, which is not to say that he will not be subjected to antisemitism if he embraces it fully, but to this place where he realizes that the wisdom and the ritual that he has lost because he has not embraced that part of himself, is an important thing that he wants for himself. It's a really lovely movie. And Spike Lee doesn't often do a storyline about religion, but this is a really important right storyline about faith.

George Mason: So here in Dallas, the new Holocaust museum has been opened and they made a very deliberate decision to call it the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. And recently when Governor Abbott made the decision to opt out of the federal resettlement program for refugees in Texas, The Holocaust and Human Rights museum stepped up to say this: "Coming out of a Jewish experience, we need to stand up for the rights of those who are not Jewish, but who are similarly being imperiled by this rejection."

Greg Garrett: Yeah.

George Mason: It seems to me that this is an example of how in this film and how generally we need to be approaching these matters, that there is a particularity of everyone's individual experience that must be honored and recognized, not co-opted or appropriated. But yet we can't stay only within the confines of our own suffering and experience and privilege it to such an extent that there's no empathy, there's no compassion, there's no advocacy for someone else. This gets to, I think, some of the question of what are two white guys like us doing sitting here talking about race?

Greg Garrett: Well, we had some conversation about that earlier after the film and it's a conversation I've had to have often over the last four or five years because I've spent all this time working on a book, convening these film screenings and conversations. And the reasons I thought I needed to be doing this when I started are not necessarily the reasons I feel like I need to do them now. One of the things that's become clearer and clearer to me as time has passed is that I think white people of good conscience often sit back and allow people of color to advance the conversation about racism, even though they are the people who are most vulnerable and most in danger. And one of the things that's become clear to me is that out of my privilege as a white middle class working professional male, I don't face that same kind of danger or ridicule.

Greg Garrett: There may be some people shaking their heads and saying, "Why don't you stay in your lane?"

George Mason: Yes.

Greg Garrett: But I think ultimately the other thing is that at the end of the day, it is all of our lanes. It's the thing about us all having skin in the game.

George Mason: Exactly.

Greg Garrett: Because I have this very strong sense that I cannot be who I'm called to be while someone else is held in oppression. Dr. King used to say that until all of us are free, none of us are free. And there's that very powerful sense that I am still in bondage as long as any my brothers or sisters are in any kind of bondage.

George Mason: Yes. Right.

Greg Garrett: So, to be the people that we are called to be and for me to be a good Christian, a good citizen, and I certainly put them in that order, I have got to speak out on behalf of my brothers and sisters who would find it more difficult to do so. And to use the platforms that I have and the teaching and writing that I have available to me in order to continue this conversation that has been begun by martyrs and heroes.

George Mason: So I think when Barack Obama was elected President, he represented hope to a lot of white people who actually voted for him and then voted for Donald Trump. There was a sense of what we call moral licensing that took place where someone could say, "Well, I voted for Obama, but he disappointed me." And one of the disappointments you hear from white people who then voted for Donald Trump is that he didn't "fix the racial problem." He didn't solve it. If we could just elect a black president, then he will tell black people that it's over and that it's done.

George Mason: But instead, when he stood up for Jordan Edwards, when he stood up for various young men who were killed and said, "That could have been my son" or something like that.

Greg Garrett: Trayvon Martin.

George Mason: Trayvon Martin as well, then he disappointed them because instead he was race baiting. He was re-racializing instead of solving. So what's your take on how all of that took place?

Greg Garrett: I think that that is a really important thing for us to call attention to because I think a lot of us, me included, had the hope that maybe we were now in a different space racially. One of the things that I've discovered in my research is that all of this moves in waves and we can talk about, as Dr. King did, the idea of the arc of the moral universe. But our response to racism and prejudice seems to be cyclical and a step forward, a step back, two steps forward, a step back or as right now, three steps back. And so we actually probably should have predicted that if a black person was elected President and didn't act like a white person or act as the white people who voted for him thought that he ought to, that there would be a backlash in response to that. And so I think one of the things that we wrestle with now is that there are still people who think, "Well, we've ticked this box and we don't have to talk about race anymore."

Greg Garrett: Clearly that is untrue because we know from the newspaper every day that there is some horror happening somewhere in the country, but there are people who believe that we've achieved parity and I don't know why people of color are still angry, and why do they have to say Black Lives Matter? All lives matter. Which is actually what we heard chanted Charlottesville.

George Mason: We did, in fact. So this gets to the matter that you talked about a little while earlier in our church setting with BlacKkKlansman about the different arenas of sin. That is to say there's the personal, the social and the institutional. Often we group the social and institutional as one group. Jesse Jackson likes to say that there's the sin within and the sin we're in. And most often white Americans focus on the sin within and not the sin we're in.

George Mason: The social and institutional aspects of racism that have to still be unmasked and recognized as affecting our everyday lives in powerful ways. What would you say to those who are watching or listening to this program would be some concrete steps, ways to go beyond the personal and recognize the involvement in social and institutional racism?

Greg Garrett: And I think that is, as you say, the big question because many of us are just happy to say, "Well, I don't think I'm racist, I'm not part of the problem." But, we benefit every day from being in this hierarchal society that's been set up in which we are privileged and other people are dispossessed in various ways. So I think one of the things that came out of our conversation earlier this morning after the film was just first this very powerful sense that I can act. And even though I had some side conversations with people who said, "I don't feel like it's enough. I don't feel like it's enough." What I said to all of those people is, "It's not nothing."

George Mason: Ah, there you go. Okay.

Greg Garrett: Just to speak up first about the fact that we continue to live in a society where some people benefit inordinately and other people are held down to benefit those people. So to talk about it, to bring it out into the open is I think a major thing. And of course we had one of your residents or past residents this morning said we need to organize. How is it possible that these thousands of white supremacists can show up in one place? And all the best we can do is a ragtag band of Holy warriors.

George Mason: Exactly.

Greg Garrett: To thumb their noses at them. We've got to have some kind of organization.

George Mason: To be anti-racist.

Greg Garrett: To be anti-racist.

George Mason: Not just not racist. But anti-racist.

Greg Garrett: Yeah. It's not just for us to stand over and go, "Hey, we're not like them." But to say, "Hey, we don't want to be a part of this thing anymore." And then the big kind of macro level is there are still a lot of laws and policies on the books that hold people in a state of oppression. And until those are addressed, until those systemic things are held up to the light and claimed and we feel some shame for them and remorse for them, as long as the system is allowed to exist invisibly underground, right then it doesn't matter if we personally are racist or not, because the culture is going to continue taking along without us.

George Mason: Greg, I can't tell you how great it is to have you here and thank you for being on Good God to talk about these things.

Greg Garrett: You're so very welcome.

George Mason: More than that. Thank you for continuing to shine the light on these matters too. God bless you. Thank you.

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