Response paper

By Tom Wheat

For Poli. 10

Pro. G. Brahm

UCSC

7/16/02

The film “Do the Right Thing,” by Spike Lee attempts to portray the tension, violence, and eventual reconciliation between race, and culture in Gotham City. The Characters, Smiley, Radio Rahim, Mookey, Sal, and Bugginn Out, all portray the cultural facets of American life undergoing increased urbanization.  Racial conflict in the film is illustrated by scenes of dialogue, and scenes of rioting stemming originally from the hostility many blacks felt about having foreign races, i.e., Italians and Koreans, owning stores in their neighborhood, while they themselves had so few opportunities for economic advancement.

Buggin Out initially comes into conflict with Sal over his Italian ‘wall of fame,’ in that no famous blacks were represented. However, Sal’s ethnic experience of being an Italian did not initially make him a racist overtly; yet it did somewhat constitute intrinsic cultural bias with his refusal to put up some famous African Americans on his wall of fame. Buggin Out decides to boycott Sal’s pizzeria, only one problem is, that Mookey, his class brother and friend, who is the protagonist of the movie, works for Sal. Radio Rahim and Buggin Out get together and decide to organize a boycott outside Sal’s.

Mookey is counting down early and asks Sal if he can get off early and be paid for the week.  All of a sudden a bunch of routy partygoers show up right as the store is about to close, and begin to essentially trash the place. Sal and his two Italian sons began to exchange insults with the crowd when all of a sudden Radio Rahim and Buggin Out show up with Rahim blasting his ghettobox on the front counter, and both begin to denounce Sal’s Pizzeria and demand that the neighborhood boycott Sal’s. Sal picks up a bat and smashes the boom box. Rahim and Sal then engage in a brawl and the ensuing action initiates a street riot, culminating in the destruction of Sal’s pizzeria, but not before Radio Rahim is asphyxiated with a policeman’s night stick.

In all of this the protagonist Mookey is forced to renounce his loyalty to Sal in favor of his own class and racial sphere by his act of hurling the trashcan into Sal’s window. It was that initial act that instigated the crowd to street riot. Public order is restored by fire hoses however the institutional underpinnings of class inequity, race and cultural conflict are not addressed rather sanitized by public law as brute force. Overall, Spike Lee’s film suggests that in the aftermath of revolution and rioting in the reconciliation of conflict that true progress can only be achieved through non-violent means.