When I think of the Ku Klux Klan, I don’t think of an organization capable of attracting people eager to tell the truth about who they are. I think of a group of folks who are more comfortable obscuring their identities behind hoods and bedsheets – usually with good reason.
That’s why I’m not surprised by the accusations of fraud being lobbed at “Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate in America.”
The series was originally scheduled to run on A&E this month before it was yanked for violating the network’s standards for truthfulness. The producers paid many of the participants for their participation.
One can understand the producers’ confusion at being penalized for playing fast and loose with the conventions of reality programming. After all, A&E is the same network that airs the “honest” and “unscripted” antics of “Duck Dynasty,” a highly dishonest and obviously scripted program.
Since little of what happens on “Duck Dynasty” corresponds to reality or the truth, the producers probably assumed A&E would be cool with whatever they dragged up from the bowels of rural America, as long as it had a compelling narrative.
In a different year they probably would’ve gotten away with a project normalizing the banality of the Ku Klux Klan, but fake news finally became an embarrassment to American democracy, thanks to the 2016 election.
Published reports of cash payments amounting to thousands of dollars along with off-camera coaching about what should be said and how the Klansmen should act compromised what little integrity the initial idea for the series ever had.
Still, it is nothing less than surreal to imagine the series’ producers instructing Klansmen on the proper use of racial epithets when referring to blacks. You’d think that would be the one thing the Klansmen could get right without too much prompting.
According to a report about the fiasco in Variety, the producers insisted on a more liberal use of the “n-word” than what the very bigoted participants were inclined to provide on their own when the cameras rolled. Ah, the scourge of politically correct Klansmen. What is this world coming to?
The fact that the documentarians even paid for the burlap, the gasoline, the wood for the cross burnings along with the food the Klansmen ate and served at those events testifies to the laziness of that particular group of hatemongers. It even feels a little like entrapment if everything has to be done for them.
As of now, the project, which was originally known as “Generation KKK,” is dead unless the producers can wrestle the rights back from A&E and shop the broken pieces to a network with even looser standards for truth in documentaries.
It’s just as well, though. As a group, the Klan carries considerable historical baggage — all of it bad. They began as a motley collection of white Southern citizens who thought a campaign of violent intimidation against the newly freed blacks would somehow make them feel better about themselves and about losing the war.
Harassment quickly escalated into lynching parties and even mass murder as the rights won by blacks during Reconstruction were systematically rolled back.
Within a few years, the Ku Klux Klan had become an officially sanctioned group with thriving chapters across the country. America’s first and most violent domestic terror organization had come a long way.
With every church bombing and every murder during the heyday of the civil rights era, the Klan lost a little more of its patina of righteousness. The Klan’s numbers declined dramatically in the 1970s as other fringe groups, including neo-Nazis and other militia groups, rushed to fill the vacuum of intolerance.
These days, the Ku Klux Klan has been upstaged by smooth-talking white nationalists who wear well-cut suits, eat Thai food and hang out at Starbucks. I’d much rather see a documentary about how these guys wage their insidious charm offensive — not a rehash of the lives of a bunch of dead-enders.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
First Published: January 3, 2017, 5:00 a.m.