I watched The Birth of a Nation for the first time the week after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Glued to the television, I found myself unable to turn away from the horror of what I was seeing, flipping between CNN and MSNBC to find the coverage that best expressed the anger, disbelief, and sheer shock I felt upon seeing our nation turn its back on its weakest, poorest citizens. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of New Orleans’ impoverished residents, the ones left behind to die by the incompetence and callousness of the Bush administration, were African-American, and I got to thinking about the ways in which the most inaccurate stories the media told that week, the ones that showed the highest level of up-is-down, black-is-white wrong-headedness, were the ones that sought to impose older narratives on this clearly unprecedented disaster. And so we had Fox News and its contemptible right-wing cronies concentrating almost entirely on the nearly nonexistent threat of gun-toting gang members, and ignoring, for the most part, the human suffering in clear view, everywhere. Similarly, although less viciously, the early reports on the hurricane’s fallout sought to depict the damage as an equal-opportunity act of God, one that struck everyone equally, regardless of race, class, or income level. This scrim was utterly flawed, contradicted as it was by every image on our TV screens of poor African-Americans left stranded on the roofs of their homes, crammed into the Superdome, or trudging along the highways with what remained of their worldly goods.

All of which brings me back to Birth of a Nation and to the two conjoined responses I had on belatedly seeing it, which were less intellectual than personal. Simply put, Birth of a Nation is a horrific document of stomach-churning racism, on a par with Triumph of the Will as a well-crafted film that expresses humankind’s absolute, unvarnished worst, an aesthetically pleasing expression of a hideous ideology. In addition, Birth of a Nation is history written not “with lightning” but upside down and backward. Griffith’s technical skill almost makes us capable of cheering for the Ku Klux Klan as they ride to the defense of helpless white womanhood, but it also symbolizes his moral and ethical bankruptcy that he made a film in which white literally became black. The crimes of white Southerners, which could fill countless Births, are elided entirely, exchanged for the wholly imaginary crimes of wholly imaginary African Americans, whose sole goals in the film appear to be the humiliation of entirely innocent white men and the rape and possession of their white women. Entire generations of film critics, bewitched by Griffith’s filmmaking abilities, chose to avert their eyes from his racism, chalking it up to the mores of a now-bygone era. Birth was celebrated for its numerous advances in filmmaking technique, crafting a style of montage that would become the norm for the coming century of cinema. Entire generations of film critics were wrong.

With the images of New Orleans buzzing in my skull, it is clear to me, above all, that Griffith’s film is not a museum piece, not an isolated event, and not to be dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary American life. Rather, Birth of a Nation is a sizable link in a chain of despicable, racist depictions of African Americans, a chain that continues to this very day, with life-and-death implications for those whose humanity it impugns. Imaginary crimes committed by the victims of much greater, unmentioned crimes; a refusal to face the horrific neglect of an entire segment of the American populace; and an overall sensibility that says one group of Americans’ lives are not as valuable as another’s—this could all also describe coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Birth of a Nation isn’t dead; it’s not even past.

The examples are too numerous to ignore. It’s clear from the first intertitles, which state, among other things, that “the bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion,” that we will be seeing an unusual (to say the least) take on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Antebellum slavery is a relatively placid affair, with slaves dancing and waving their caps for the amusement of their kind owners. The film’s first half is a rapid-fire Civil War, from Fort Sumter to Lincoln’s assassination, but serves primarily to set the stage for its second half, where it kicks into a higher gear. Birth of a Nation steps softly around Lincoln, but the implication is clear that he, too, was a tyrant, seeking to impose an idea of the nation over the will of the states. With Lincoln dead, the radical Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) comes to power in the North, seeking to elevate Southern blacks over their white superiors. The mere outbreak of war sets black soldiers to looting and marauding, and war’s end, and their elevation to positions of power, drives the simple souls batty.

Griffith pauses midway through the film to offer the following justification: “This is a historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” Why tell us this halfway through the film? The answer swiftly becomes clear: because the Reconstruction period is when the film’s floodgates open, and the true ugliness emerges.

Stoneman, now the North’s head honcho, sends his mulatto flunky Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) to lord it over the South, leading the carpetbaggers in their invasion of the defeated whites’ land. Birth of a Nation is a film disgusted by the bodily presence of blacks, and we are meant to recoil along with one character when he appears sickened at the thought of touching a black housemaid’s hand. Sassy black soldiers talk back to upstanding Southern officer Colonel Cameron (Henry Walthall), leaving even Southern blacks upset by the behavior of their uppity Northern brethren. Worse than the thought of touching their hand, and even worse than living under their thumbs, is the most horrific thought of all: blacks stealing their women. One black, Gus (Walter Long), takes the liberty of chasing after a snow-white Southern belle, and she chooses to leap off a cliff rather than succumb to his advances. Even Stoneman eventually comes to understand the white man’s burden; Lynch tells him he plans to marry a white woman, and he claps him on the back, but when he finds out it is his daughter (Lillian Gish), he recoils in horror. The wounds of the Civil War are healed by finding a common scapegoat: African Americans. As one intertitle puts it, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.”

The second half of Birth of a Nation was intended to leave its viewers speechless, shaking with anger at the dastardliness of the upstart blacks, and their white supporters. Instead, it leaves us helpless with anger at its lies, its elisions, and the sheer virulence of its racism. It must be seen in its entirety to be believed, and no clip or segment can give an adequate impression of the astonishing ugliness of the whole film. Just a few examples: Colonel Cameron’s founding of the KKK described as “sav(ing) the South from the anarchy of black rule”; whites looking for Gus in order to give him “a fair trial”; KKK men soaking a Confederate flag in a white woman’s blood to consecrate it; Dr. Cameron brought in chains before his former slaves, who laugh and jeer at him; helpless whites gunned down by marauding packs of blacks; the triumphal arrival of the KKK to save the day for the white race. The only thing Birth of a Nation is unsure of is whether the theft of their property is worse than their women’s loss of dignity, or vice versa.

In all fairness, Birth of a Nation tells the truth once. After its victory, we see the KKK preserving order by keeping African Americans from voting in the next election, their guns pointed squarely at those who courageously made the attempt. In short, Birth of a Nation is history written by the winners, for the winners, but it is also tormented by a secret shame. In order to slough off that shame, which is slavery and race-hatred, Birth creates a sham history, with a sham problem, and a sham solution. It is upside-down American history, and its consequences are felt this very moment, when hurricane victims are treated like criminals, and the real criminals are those in power. The film’s vicious, uneducated, and criminal blacks were the same ones trotted out last week by right-wing fear-mongers, eager to stuff the disaster into some dark hole where the victims could safely be blamed for their own suffering. We deserved better reckonings with the ugliest parts of our past then, and we deserve a better reckoning now. And Birth of a Nation should be called what it is: a lie.