Twenty-nine years ago, Roger Ebert said of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing that “it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time”. Now, with BlacKkKlansman, the 61-year-old film-maker again proves his work to be deserving of such a bold statement.

His latest is a historic depiction of race relations yet has its gaze firmly set on present racial problems. It’s based on the real life experiences of Ron Stallworth, Colorado Springs police department’s first black police officer. Stallworth’s undercover operation, which saw him artfully infiltrate a local Ku Klux Klan chapter, earned him the unintended respect and reverence of KKK leader and grand wizard, David Duke.

Though the events of the movie feel bound by history, its commentary provides insight into how America still struggles with race. The intensified strain within the film feels relevant once again with Duke-endorsed president Donald Trump screaming that it’s time to “take our country back”.

And the film demonstrates that it is against this backdrop that people of color are expected to survive and thrive in America.

For Stallworth, surviving on the job meant that he had to possess the ability to be both a “model negro” and to be perpetually forgiving. Stallworth, played by John David Washington, is answering question after question during an interview with the police chief and a black mayoral representative, when he’s told to be the Jackie Robinson of the police department. His conduct was of superior importance for the mayoral representative as he reminded Ron that if someone called him the N-word to “turn the other cheek”.

While this may have been an instruction for Washington’s character in the 1970s – being the kind of black person that society perceives Jackie Robinson to be and the type to turn the other cheek – many people of color still follow this guidance today.

Narratives about civil rights victories are inherently tricky because telling those stories is not proprietary to any particular group. There’s a reason why the more radical nature of Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches and beliefs never made it into our classroom textbooks. And there’s a reason why whites and blacks alike can herald Jackie Robinson as a civil rights hero yet can be so split on Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem. And there’s a reason why we conveniently forget that even Jackie Robinson had his moments of what some might consider radical: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”

Through the rose-colored lens of respectability politics, we often choose to craft historical narratives in a way that removes any offense from our mainstream sensibilities. So in our textbooks, we sterilize King and Robinson’s doses of radicalism to ensure that mainstream America doesn’t feel guilt for the egregious actions of its past. This neutered view of race, informed by bad recollections of history, forced Ron and continues to force many people of color to fit into boxes of docile activism.

The expectations of the meek, mild, compromising black leader didn’t fit well with Ron’s first undercover assignment to detect radicalism in Kwame Ture’s (formerly Stokely Carmichael, noted pan-Africanist and Black Panther) speech to a college group. During the dramatized scene, Ture warns of a coming war. For the police listening in, it was cause to be concerned for safety while the open target practice and talks of detonating a bomb by members of the Klan warranted very little concern on the part of the police officers.

Part of how Stallworth got his way into Duke’s good graces in the film was his ability to modulate his voice on the phone and use references white people would appreciate.

Juggling his blackness while appealing to mainstream attitudes was what Ron called “speaking the King’s English and talking jive”. It’s something that people of color do every day. WEB DuBois, famed civil rights activist and sociologist, called it “double-consciousness”. He described it as “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.

Some call it code-switching, but while it might sound like a convenience, it’s actually a means of survival.

Watching Ron live out this double-consciousness immediately triggered vivid memories of my own management of double consciousness – conducting that tricky dance that leaves no room for inelegance. Whether in classrooms or working environments I, like plenty of people of color, modulate our voices, adjust our actions, and pay careful attention to our tone.

Topher Grace as David Duke in BlacKkKlansman. Photograph: David Lee/2018 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

But most resoundingly, BlacKkKlansman reminds us that racism has an evolving set of semantics and tactics.

Towards the middle of the film, Ron’s supervising officer talks about the shifting battlefield of upholding racist structures. While the burning of crosses, he warns, would persist, the changing landscape ensured that racism and cross burning would become dirty words and dirtier activities, respectively. The new tactics employed by racists would center around more targeted policy.

Duke runs down a list of the policy issues that would help extend white supremacy: voting rights, affirmative action, and more. The film demonstrates the everlasting link between the racist origins of these policies and their disparate racial impacts. And now, years after, we mistakenly disentangle the push to suppress these opportunities for equity and equality for people of color with their discriminatory origins.

But because we have suppressed them, we call them different terms. We call the desire to ensure that blacks can’t catch up academically “affirmative action” and bludgeon the policy practice’s reputation. We call the supervision of formerly confederate states’ voting processes government overreach, instead of what it is: the empowering of the vote for people of color.

And just when one began to believe that this stealthier, public policy approach to racism had fully replaced the violent and gruesome manifestations of white supremacy, the film cuts to scary, and at times bloody scenes of Charlottesville.

But potentially more powerful, is a video of Donald Trump’s epic false equivalence of protestors during the Charlottesville Unite-the-Right events. It’s followed by present-day David Duke, laudably quoting Trump as a rallying cry to his crowd of supporters: “it’s time to take our country back”.