Over the summer, Spike Lee’s defining film Do The Right Thing celebrated its 31-year anniversary. The movie takes place on one of the hottest days of the year in a Brooklyn neighborhood and follows a young Black man, Mookie, played by Lee himself, as he delivers pizzas and engages in small talk with friends. His employer, Sal, is an Italian-American who has been serving pizzas in the neighborhood for over 25 years, although he lives in a predominantly Italian area of Lower Manhattan. Sal’s sons, Pino and Vito, work at the pizzeria alongside Mookie. While Mookie and Vito are on friendly terms, Pino harbors a deep grudge against Mookie and Brooklyn’s Black community. Through the course of the sweltering summer day, racial tensions broil, culminating with the murder by asphyxiation of a young Black man, Radio Raheem, at the hands of the NYPD. After Radio’s death, a riot breaks out, with Mookie torn between his respect for Sal, who helped him provide for his family, and his loyalty to Brooklyn’s Black community during a time of great pain and righteous anger.
Do the Right Thing leaves today’s audience at a loss. When it was released, the movie was an intimate and accurate portrayal of the racial tensions and violence experienced by the Black community during the 1980s. Lee might not have expected that it would speak so powerfully to the reality of Black Americans more than thirty years later. Sadly, one can’t help but see the striking resemblance between the murder of Radio Raheem and the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and the many others whose deaths have sparked the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and waves of protests all across the country. What can this movie teach us about the continued struggle of Black Americans today? Three major themes shed light on the pivotal moment in which we find ourselves.
First, a prominent theme in the film is voice. Characters in the movie are constantly struggling to be heard. For example, Smiley, a man with a developmental disability, wanders the streets of Brooklyn trying to spread knowledge about the legacies and ideologies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as he sells pictures of the two leaders shaking hands. Smiley is often ridiculed by community members and strangers because he stutters and groans as he tries to express the importance of these two competing approaches of achieving racial equality. Similarly, Radio Raheem carries around a boombox, loudly playing Public Enemy’s Fight the Power and calling for a revolution. Though it is not his own message, it is one that he is desperately trying to project out into society. Smiley’s stutter and Radio’s boombox are metaphors for the Black community’s search for voice. For years, crimes have been committed against Black people across the country. These crimes are often underreported in the media and are ignored by the public. In recent years, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, this silencing of the everyday struggles of Black Americans has begun to change. Unfortunately, Smiley and Radio’s desire for voice has yet to be fully realized.
Second, the movie presents the duality of love and hate. This tension, the basis of all human action, has long been used by artists of different mediums, but Lee uniquely personifies it through the movie’s characters. Mookie in particular struggles to reconcile between these two forces over the course of the day. Take, for example, the first interaction between Mookie and Radio Raheem. After a bit of small talk, Mookie asks Radio about his elaborate rings which read “Love” and “Hate”, one on each hand. Radio then dives into a passionate soliloquy about the constant and long-standing battle between love and hatred over the course of history. The film urges us to compare these two driving forces to the ideologies of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) and Malcolm X. MLK advocated for non-violent tactics when dealing with racial injustice. He believed that violence “seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding”. On the other hand, Malcolm X championed the use of justified violence as a means to gain equality and justice, but only under the circumstances of self-defense. He said, “…you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation,” in which the “situation” referred to is the abuse of power by those who have it against those who don’t. Decades after the two iconic leaders debated their different approaches and 31 years after Lee embodied their duality, this argument is still at the heart of the fight for racial justice.
Third, Do The Right Thing successfully and uniquely captures the ever-present role of bias in social dynamics. In the film, interactions between those of different racial and ethnic backgrounds are brimming with contention. A scene that best demonstrates this tension and blatant stereotyping is one in which characters speak directly to the camera and make offensive, stereotypical comments and racial slurs directed at one ethnic group after another. Black people, Italians, Latinx people, Koreans, and Jews are all targeted in this short but shocking string of clips. Watching Do the Right Thing can lead you to believe that it was made in a far worse era, one in which racist expressions were more explicit and commonplace. This would be a mistake. While bias and racism are sometimes less visible today, they remain deeply rooted in our social interactions. Growing attention to the role that implicit bias plays in all areas of our lives is an acknowledgement of all the work that is still needed to actually combat this societal ill.
Taken together, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing sadly remains a reflection of our current reality, which is plagued by systemic racism in our law enforcement, governmental, economic, and educational institutions. The film helps us to understand how issues of race have evolved in some respects but persisted in many others. We are still a long way from the day when we all consistently “do the right thing”.