I will never forget the first college class I attended: ENG 389W British Romantic Drama. Before the class began, my professor projected the following statement on the board and read it aloud: “Emory University acknowledges the Muscogee (Creek) people who lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located.” It may be an English department tradition because, aside from the occasional mention in a club meeting, I have not encountered that statement since.

Do the Right Thing is set in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, NY. At the heart of the neighborhood is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, an institution that has been owned and operated by a white man named Sal (Danny Aiello) for over 25 years. Sal’s sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson) run the pizzeria alongside him. Ironically, Pino harbors racism toward the very people who are responsible for his family’s monetary success; hence, highlighting the tension between personal prejudice and economic dependence.

The film’s central conflict emerges when Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) challenges Sal over the “Wall of Fame” in his pizzeria, which exclusively features Italian-American celebrities. Before getting escorted out by Mookie (Spike Lee), Buggin’ Out insists that Sal add plaques of prominent Black figures—they represent both the community he serves and the primary source of his revenue. In a sense, the “Wall of Fame” serves as an inadequate land acknowledgment.

To Sal, the wall is a private expression of his heritage. To Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn)—“you come into Sal’s, no rap, no music”—it is a public symbol of cultural erasure. Sal’s insistence on maintaining the state of the wall reflects his deeper, perhaps subconscious, refusal to adapt to his surroundings. The tension around the wall heightens due to concurrent acts of gentrification in the neighborhood. My favorite example of this is the shop “Korean Fruits and Vegetables,” another business that is dependent on Black patronage, yet whose utilitarian name manifests a quiet detachment from its patrons.

The “Wall of Fame” is a microcosm for systemic racism; it is the invisible line between inclusion and exclusion, and who gets to define what “greatness” is in a shared space. In fact, the riot that ensues at the end of the film is incentivized by the real-world struggle for Black representation in the media, politics, and history. Despite their mutual dependence—“you grew up on my food”—Sal and his customers’ clash over the wall lays bare the pervasive challenge of cultural integration in a racially divided society.

Does anyone “do the right thing” in Do the Right Thing? No—not when every action is shaped by personal pain, lived history, and a system that pits survival against principle. The “right thing” is an ambiguous construct.