In defense of Spike Lee

The New York Observer catches a whiff of Black Paranoia:

Last October, he tussled with Tucker Carlson (“the guy in the bow tie”) on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher when Mr. Lee said he’d be including in his documentary the conspiracy theory that it was the U.S. government who bombed the levees.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Even today, a large part of the African-American community of New Orleans thinks that those levees were bombed. Now, whether that is true or not, that should not be discounted.”

He rattled off past government trespasses: 1927’s Great Flood of Mississippi, when the levees were, in fact, blown up; the flooding of the Ninth Ward during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

“So, in the collective mind of African-Americans, it is not some science-fiction, hocus-pocus thing to say that the government is doing stuff,” he continued. “Even if it didn’t happen, you cannot discount it and dismiss it as Oh you people are crazy."

I'll be the first to admit I've never seen a Spike Lee movie and probably never will. The guy's take on matters racial just doesn't interest me all that much. And it's very easy to criticize the guy for playing on black fears when promoting a movie in which he alleges (or at least publicly airs an allegation) that those fears might be justified by government action. But it's also too easy to pretend that black fears of government shenanigans are simple paranoia with no basis in fact. The actual "trespasses" Lee notes ought to give us pause before we put too much stock in government integrity.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is a sterling example. The flood displaced more than half a million Americans, and boats in Greenville were sent in to rescue white women and children from atop levees and from containment camps. Blacks who were left behind were forced - at gunpoint - to clean the area up. The aftermath of the flood resulted not only in Herber Hoover becoming a national figure and Huey Long being elected governor of Louisiana, but was a major factor in blacks joining the Democrat party and the great migration of blacks from the South to the north.

The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, in which several hundred black sharecroppers were lied to about their curable condition while the government studied the long-term effects of syphillis on them, ended in 1972 after a whistleblower, not able to get the CDC to intervene "until the experiment was completed" (i.e. until all the subjects died of syphillis-related illness and were autopsied), went to the press.

Obviously, in both these cases, blacks were mistreated by their own government, in the latter case over the course of 3 decades, for reasons of its own. And while both cases led to new laws, apologies, and promises to do better, the fact remains that blacks have historically found themselves receiving the short end of the stick, sacrificed for the good of the majority white population.

In other words, it's not paranoia: it's history.

It may be comforting for white Americans to write off such fears with an assertion of the good intentions of government or to say that such things wouldn't happen today. But it ought to be realized, looking at the acts of governments covering centuries, that such is simply a faith position. And it is a faith that black Americans can be forgiven for not sharing.