Nearly twenty years after it's release, Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing remains one of the most important films ever made.
Say what you will about the African American Mr. Lee, whose long-standing, controversial filmography has never shied away from the subject of race, but the director found the perfect voice to speak for the confusion that is race in America in this 1989 movie.
Set against a New York City block during the hottest day of the summer, Mookie (played by Lee himself) observes and interacts with racism from nearly every foreseeable ethnic perspective.
And while primarily told from the black perspective, the importance of this film lies in its illustration of the flaws and justifications within each prejudice.
It's shown when the group of young black friends scoffing at a white middle-aged man who proclaims to be "born in Brooklyn." Likewise, the Italian patriarch of a long-standing pizza place (Danny Aiello) refuses to put pictures of African-Americans on his Italian populated "Wall of Fame." He argues that it is his store and therefore his right to do so, portraying the issue of race in both an apparent and complex manner.
While it would be nice to proclaim that we live in some perfect, "post-racist" America two decades later, recent events argue differently.
Only yesterday, the Washington Post released an article titled, "Obama Photo in Turban, Robe Causes Stir," concerning a recently released photograph of Obama in a turban. The entire outfit was the traditional Somali dress the Senator put on during a Senatorial tour of Africa in 2006.
Only hours later, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe charged the Clinton campaign of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering," accusing the Senator Clinton and her advisors of sending the photo to the "Drudge Report," where it appeared online.
Does Hillary Clinton really believe a picture of Obama in a turban will insight believable doubt in the American voter?
Unfortunately, while brutally desperate on Clinton's part, it's not a ridiculous play. Does this alone not speak for the racism still thriving in our country?
In Lee's film, a trio of jobless Black men criticizes Korean shop owners for not knowing how to speak English, inciting Asian slurs such as "chink" in response to their accents.
They go on to justify the Korean couple's success, as compared to their joblessness, as an issue of skin color. "It must be because we're black," one argues. Lee is not defending his own race here, but rather satirizing the excuses made, by those black or white, in order to get out of both work and guilt.
Throughout the film, controversial, race-related incidents, such as the Eleanor Bumpers incident of 1984, are referenced, the film's gritty conclusion serving as an eerie foreshadowing to the Rodney King incident only two years later.
At the climax of Do The Right Thing, Mookie, and a group of people, watch their friend strangled to death by a white police officer. Mookie proceeds to throw a trashcan into the window of the Italian pizza place, inciting a vicious riot. As the Italian patriarch watches his shop burn to the ground, the viewer is asked to consider the reasoning behind Mookie's actions. Did he do the right thing? What is the right thing?
Race is never as simple as "doing the right thing" and Mr. Lee knows this. It is our job as Americans to accept and acknowledge race, while not exploiting it.
After all, in the world we live now, sometimes all it takes is a turban to get the people going.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
