Do the Right Thing: Race & Racism in America

Do the Right Thing, Directed by Spike Lee, is a story of an average Brooklyn block composed mainly of minorities. The neighborhood is predominantly African American, but there are mixes of Latinos, Asians and Caucasians as well. The film centers around Mookie (Spike Lee), a young, African American man who works hard as a delivery boy for the neighborhood pizzeria, Sal's Famous Pizzeria. While Mookie's struggle is working hard to try and support his girlfriend, Tina, and their son, Hector, this is not the central story of our film, but just one of the many little side-stories that we witness, among all the other personalities and daily bouts of the other characters. In fact, Spike Lee exposes us to a multitude of different characters throughout the film, characters that each contain significant symbolization and important messages about race and the way it is perceived in American culture.

Do the Right Thing certainly has a lot to say about race, racial stereotypes and interracial relations, and Lee shows us this through the variety of characters he has provided: we have Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a large Black man who we rarely ever see speak, but instead carries around a boombox that constantly replays a song called Fight the Power. Radio Raheem is probably the most perplexing character out of all of them: he is someone who has little to say, but has such a large impact on the people who surround him, especially Sal, who is annoyed by the constant blaring of his music. Another interesting character is Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), another Black male, spastic and always looking to instigate any type of uprising. My personal take on Buggin' Out was that Lee used him to represent the stereotypical, loudmouth Black guy that everybody loves to hate. We see Buggin' Out make attempts throughout the film to start protests and arguments, but no one in the neighborhood really pays him any mind. It can be argued that Lee has taken each of his characters, and used them to symbolize the different "types" of racial stereotypes we see in our society: the fruit-vending Asians, the loudmouth Latinos, the argumentative Blacks and the hotheaded Caucasians.

When Lee takes these characters and mixes them together in a Brooklyn block, we see trouble occur and tensions rise. These tensions are results of racial differences (or in-differences), but there is really no predominating race that is the victim of these tensions, as they are all victims of each other's violence and insults. As Roger Ebert mentions in his article on this film (1989), Lee "made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants. He didn't draw lines or take sides but simply looked with sadness at one racial flashpoint that stood for many others.". Lee did exactly this, because throughout the film, it is hard to truly pity just one race, because we get a sense of the struggles faced by each group: Sal (Danny Aiello) and his son Vino (Italians) trying to cope with the ignorance of their neighborhood customers, and especially Vino who has no qualms about the fact that he is racist, the Blacks who are continually misunderstood and remain mostly unheard by the people around them, and the Asians and Latinos who are mere bystanders of the neighborhood issues.

After days of intense heat and boiling tensions, Buggin' Out, who has still failed to make himself heard among his community, decides that he is displeased with Sal and his pizza shop for having only pictures of white people on the store's wall of fame. With the help of Radio Raheem, who is also against Sal for telling him to shut his music off, assists him in going to Sal's and starting a riot. Insults are exchanged, and Sal calls the two the unthinkable "N word". Riled up, Radio and Buggin' physically assault Sal, while Mookie attempts to break them up. Soon enough, after a ruckus has been made, the entire neighborhood gets involved in the altercation, and a mob breaks out in the pizza shop. Fists are thrown, cops are called and chaos has broken out everywhere, so much so, that Mookie must throw a trashcan through the window of the pizza shop with the hopes that the crowd might settle down, but this only incites the incident more, until it carries on out into the middle of the street. The tragic ending to this senseless violence is the death of Radio Raheem, after he has been shot by a cop, and the demise of Sal's Famous Pizzeria, after it has been burnt down to the ground.

This film actually has quite an ironic title, because throughout, no one has really "done the right thing", the only exception being Mookie, who did the right thing in his own way by trying to restore some peace and sanity at the scene of the mob when he broke the window. It can be said that Mookie had the right intentions all along, but in a society where everyone is against each other for reasons that are uncontrollable (i.e. race), it is not difficult to get caught up in the turmoil of the world, because it is and always has been all around.