Black Klansman

If there's a downside to this book, it's that Stallworth's issues with anti-racist activism could really be explored further. Like most works that cover hate groups, there's a lot of false equivalency applied to people working for civil rights because they upset law enforcement sensibilities.

“It was as if Dennis the menace was running a hate group.”

The meat of this story though, Stallworth's infiltration of the KKK, oh my! On one hand, you want to laugh at the buffoonery of David Duke and his co-conspirators. On the other, the terror of the Klan is that they somehow manage to survive and succeed in their terrorism despite their idiocy.

If nothing else, you come out of Black Klansman deeply aware that the powers that be do not take racist hate groups seriously enough. If a lone municipal investigator like Stallworth could comprehensively discombobulate regional Klan activity, why aren't more resources applied to hack such cancerous growth back to the root?

Black Klansman is a mixed bag for me, but it's definitely worth a read.

While I enjoyed the story Stallworth told, this book was badly written. It was written EXACTLY like a CSPD police report, but with a few personal anecdotes thrown in. It's written so an eight-grader can understand it, it defines many words most adults already know, and it's repetitive to drive home key points. It needed a fair amount of editing to reign in the number of run-on sentences I noticed. And couple lines really irritated me, such as “All men have a little ‘dog' in them where women are concerned”... I tabbed that with one word: Ew.

I generally appreciated Stallworth's humor throughout the book. I definitely laughed at times and feel it prevented the book from feeling dragged down by the heavy topic. I really liked some of stuff he said in the Afterword too. For example “This hatred has never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. [...] It is my belief that the Republican Party of the twenty-first century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking.” This seems so contrary to what you expect a police officer to believe, especially in the Springs. It's such an interesting account that you'll never be able to find anywhere else, and it's well worth trudging through the writing and occasional bad take.

The book was published in 2014 and I had never heard of it until Spike Lee went around promoting his film adaptation of it 4 years later. The premise itself is enough to pique anyone's curiosity and that was what that held me to its slim volume (just over 200 pages). It all revolves around Ron Stallworth, a black detective, who infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan via telephone. Main highlight of the book include the author having a phone conversation with the Grand Wizard of the Klan, David Duke, and Duke never realising it was a black man on the other line (and never realised that the detective assigned to protect him when he visited Colorado Springs was also the same man he thought was white in Duke's phone conversations with him). They are not very smart, these white supremacists.