Racial discrimination in the United States didn’t end with the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, black communities in New York were still confronting systems shaped by earlier eras of racial segregation. Just as significant was the relationship with the police, unequal treatment happen everyday. Life carried a sense of vulnerability, where dignity and safety were never guaranteed.
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing isn’t just a film, but rather it is a whole environment that you step into, the African American neighborhood. Also, it is a movie based on real violence. In 1986, Howard Beach, Queens, NYC, a group of white man chased three Black man onto a highway, and one of the Black men, Michael Griffith, was hit by a car and killed. This incident, plus the many many police violence happening in New York, pushed Spike Lee to create this film about what happens when racism, heat, and everyday disrespect happens to people just living across the street.
Me knowing the social context afterwards does not change how this film give me feelings. It is not an abstract racial tension being filmed in the studio, but rather a compression of the actual thing happening everyday in Brooklyn. The heat is the pressure that made everything cook up and explode in the community. A small argument about the wall of fame arises into a violence fight and people dying in the conflict. None of the things actually seem matters, but Lee shows how they absolutely do when the happen on top of years of ignorance and violence.
Lee doesn’t let anyone off the hook, including the audience. So this is why Lee put the two quotes at the end, one of MLK Jr. and the other one of Malcolm X.
“Violence ends by destroying itself. “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by destroying itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
AND
“I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”
That’s why those two quotes appear at the end—Martin Luther King Jr. arguing for nonviolence, Malcolm X defending self-defense. They’re not an answer, but rather they’re a contradiction the film refuses to resolve for you.
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