(Washington Insider Magazine) — We all know about Spike Lee’s capabilities as a writer and director. He has made some incredible moves like Malcolm X, She’s Gotta Have It and BlacKKKlansman. There is no denying the talents that the man has but there is no movie that, to me, stirred up way more controversy than even the director could handle.
That movie is Do the Right Thing. This film has Lee writing, directing, producing, and starring in it. Lee plays Mookie, who works as a pizza delivery man working for an Italian-owned pizzeria in a majority black neighborhood. One night, things get out of hand, and a few guys named Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out blast some loud rap music in the pizzeria and demand that they put black pictures on the restaurant walls instead of only Italian ones. As a result, Sal, the owner of the restaurant, bashes the boombox which enrages Raheem to the point of assaulting Sal. The police are called, and they violently kill Radio Raheem and arrest Buggin’ Out.
All of this commotion from the neighborhood enrages everyone else and they burn down Sal’s restaurant with he and his family left powerless to do anything about it and all over not having black pictures on the wall of a pizzeria that they own. Lee’s audience may side with the black community in the story as a way to show solidarity, but I beg to differ.
Not only does the film glorify violence and try to justify its final actions simply because Sal refused to have any black faces on the wall of his restaurant, it only gets away with it and Lee smugly thinks that he has won the audience over as his character Mookie decides to take matters into his own hands and incite a riot which just lead to more chaos and havoc. When the police killed Radio Raheem, it was wrong and when everyone in the neighborhood burned down Sal’s restaurant it was also wrong and two wrongs never make a right. That’s something Lee fails to understand in this movie. There are two sides to every story and causing more violence only begets violence and the cycle continues.
This is nothing new either. We have already seen this happen with the riots in 2020 over George Floyd, Ferguson and Baltimore. A black man was killed or assaulted by police and as an emotional response people got upset but instead of doing something constructive, they decided to loot, rob and destroy their own neighborhoods and still believe in their hearts that what they did was just and right even though it made their situation even worse.
When making this movie, Lee is now promoting the violence as part of an emotional reaction rather than mitigate it through logical reasoning. This just perpetuates the stereotype of black people being unruly, savage and emotional people when creators like Spike Lee depict them in such a way that portrays them as such. If a white director had made this movie, he would be denigrated for making black people look like savages but because Spike Lee, a black director, made this film, he is exonerated for making his own people look and act like complete buffoons.
We as a race need to stop listening to people that only look to perpetuate this victimhood mindset and even seek to profit off of it. Spike, stop trying to appease your community by reducing them to a stereotype. There’s no excuse for this. If people didn’t like it when Disney did it, they shouldn’t like it when you do it, but then again Lee has had a habit of making black people look bad. Let’s not forget Bamboozled.
