"NEWS flash," says director Spike Lee, grabbing the digital voice recorder that's on the table before him, placing it to his lips. "Spike Lee does not assume that every white person is racist. I do not feel that way. And I have not felt that way in the past. Are there some people who are like that? Yes. But I am not going to assume they are."
Lee is sitting at a large conference table in Disney's Touchstone offices in New York City's Times Square, surrounded by posters of his latest film, "Miracle at St. Anna," which opens Friday. The movie follows the grim fate of four black soldiers from the 92nd Infantry Division -- which consisted of 15,000 African American men, also known as Buffalo Soldiers -- who are caught behind enemy lines in Italy during World War II. Crouching over the table in a coiled position that suggests lack of sleep more than a readiness to pounce, Lee is fielding the question of whether he dares to think that the United States, with a population that is nearly three-quarters white, could soon vote for Barack Obama to be the first African American president.
"It's going to happen," the 51-year-old director says with a giddy rap of his fist on the wood table. Lee cites an emotional exchange from his film to explain his own state of anticipation: "There's a scene between two of the leads, Derek Luke, who plays Stamps, and Michael Ealy, who plays Bishop. It's an argument that's been going on for years, from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois on through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Bishop asks, 'Why are we here? This is not our war.' And Stamps says, 'I am doing this for the future. I am doing this for my children.'
"People like Stamps have so much faith that one day America would deliver on its promise that everyone is created equal. And we are now closer to that than any other time in this country. In 2008, we are on the verge of having a black man as president. I think that that is a sign of the greatness of this country."
Being on the cusp of a possible "seismic change" has Lee in a good mood, no sign of any soreness from the salvos he traded in May with Clint Eastwood after he criticized Eastwood's exclusion of African American soldiers in his pair of World War II movies from 2006, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." Eastwood went so far as to respond, "A guy like that should shut his face." But Lee still refuses to back down: "In World War II movies, rarely do you see black men in the picture at all, never mind being heroic," he says. "I have problems with this mythology. To this day, I still do. And if people have a problem with me because I have a problem with that, I don't know what to say, because I am not lying."
