Any adaptation is bound to take a few creative liberties with its source material, but Spike Lee’s new movie, about a black police officer who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, makes one major stylistic alteration up front: its title. The film is based on Ron Stallworth’s book Black Klansman, but the film is spelled with an extra K, as in BlacKkKlansman. So … how are we supposed to pronounce it?
The creative capitalization complicates this question even further. Is it “Black K. Klansman”? “Black-K-K-K-Klansman”? “Blac-K-K-K-Lansman“? Or perhaps, just “Black Klansman”? Lee tends to call it “the film” in interviews, but here’s producer Jordan Peele saying the title:
A representative for Focus Features confirms to Slate that the official pronunciation of the movie’s title is, simply, “Black Klansman,” meaning that the extra K is silent. That’s easy enough to remember, but is bound to disappoint the one audience member who thought this movie’s protagonist is actually named Black K. Klansman.
