The film Do the Right Thing is a film written, produced, and directed by Spike Lee. In the film the main character is Mookie, is played by Spike Lee. Mookie is a black male in his younger twenties who delivers for the neighborhood pizza parlor Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. The film takes place in the Brooklyn, New York neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, also known as Bed Stuy. Throughout the movie we do not know if the weather plays a role in the story, but the tension between racial groups’ increases. We see tension increase within the Blacks and Hispanics, Blacks and Asians, and most importantly between the Blacks and Whites (Italian.) Sal 's Famous Pizzeria is a pizza parlor in the neighborhood that many of the kids in the area grew up eating. …show more content…
A few areas that segregation is predominately seen in the United States is housing, income, and racial. In the film Do the Right Thing we see all three forms of segregation but income segregation is not as fairly presented as housing and racial. In housing segregation, groups can be segregated in five ways evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. These groups are not mutually exclusive, given race and socioeconomic status. But when a group is segregated in high in four of the five ways it is called hypersegregation. In the film we can infer that housing segregation is occurring because the neighborhood where the film takes place is predominately Black. And as we discussed in class, one of the five ways housing segregation is measured is evenness this is being the degree to which a group is spread in equal proportions among other groups across neighborhoods. This is how housing segregation is portrayed in the …show more content…
Ecological justice is the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. In class we discussed the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995, where more lives were lost to conditions that could have been prevented to a point. This occurred due to poor access to the health system, no air conditioning, and no assistance from public during this heat emergency. Public health agencies also rejected the help of volunteers. In the film we see some form of this aspect in a couple ways. One way this is seen in the film is that not many people in the neighborhood had air conditioning, although we do see many homes with fans in the windows. Another way this aspect is seen is a scene in the middle of the film where the younger kids and young adults open up a fire hydrant to cool off and have fun. Their attempt for relief from the heat was cut short when the police came by on patrol and shut off the water from the fire
Do The Right Thing was Spike Lee’s first landmark film. Do The Right Thing is a movie that brings awareness to the racial tensions when people in a Brooklyn neighborhood of different racial and cultural backgrounds coexist, which ends in a tragedy. The film was a great success receiving many of awards and earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporti...
According to Newman in Sociology: The Architecture of Everyday Life, a social class “consists of people who occupy similar positions of power, privilege, and prestige” (Newman, 2012). Someone’s position in a social class can affect “virtually every aspect of their lives, including political preferences, sexual behavior, religious affiliation, diet, and life expectancy” (Newman, 2012). The social class that was represented in the film was the middle-class. The show, Pleasantville, portrays the 1950s in which the wife would stay at home cooking and cleaning while the father works. This show holds similar views to the show, Leave it to Beaver. The movie begins
Do the Right Thing lands at number ninety-six on the American Film Institute’s List of the one hundred best movies of all time. In 1997, the American Film Institute selected the one hundred best American movies of all time and updated the top one hundred list in 2007. The director of Do the Right Thing is Spike Lee, the main actors are Rosie Perez and Danny Aiello, and the cinematographer is Ernest Dickerson. The movie stars Danny Aiello as Sal, a tough guy who owns a Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Also, Do the Right Thing portrays Spike Lee as a kid delivering pizza named Mookie who knows that there is no future in his job. The setting is in the Bedford-Stuyevesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The main source of conflict is the race relationships
People living in this neighborhood had affectionate love for Sal, but later on they became voiceless the moment their power to run their own businesses was taken away. It is because of communication breakdown that makes tension build up in the movie and ultimately ending up with Sal’s store burnt down and Radio Raheem killed by racist police officers. Spike Lee did an excellent job in the production of this movie. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) has won numerous awards in the cinematographic category. It has won awards in best music, best pictures, and best original screenplay. Indeed, this is a masterpiece that deserves to scoop such awards. This is a movie which lovers of the hip-hop culture would enjoy most. Any fan of the hip-hop culture should be familiar with Spike’s groundbreaking movie released in
All through time, the world has been racist and intolerant of people different from themselves. Countless millions have suffered due to the bigotry of people that couldn't understand change or differences among one another. There was a time when any soul that wasn't blue eyed and blonde haired in Germany, anyone with darker skin where immediately classed as inferior and not human. Even now, when you are not aware, racism is still a considerable problem. But sometimes it isn't one person being racist against another, but rather one person being racist against them self. The movie crash shows good examples of how racism against oneself, caused by fear and misunderstanding, is just as malevolent and evil as racism against another person. Fear is what makes people act racist. Farhad is one of many examples in the movie of a person who recognizes his own race and paralyzes himself through his own fear. Farhad believes that since he is Persian he is immediately being persecuted against and cheated. He flips out at the gun shop when the owner was insulting him which just furthers his fear of Americans. After the events on 9/11, which are referenced a lot in the movie, Farhad thinks that anyone who is Middle Eastern isn't welcome in America. Even after the gun shop owner was rude; his shop was destroyed by racist people who hated him. It is this same fear of being cheated because of his race that makes him very untrusting to people he doesn't know. He calls a lock smith to come fix his door because it won't lock. He immediately thinks that Daniel is trying to cheat him and steal money from him just because of his past endeavors.
The Tuskegee Study, as exampled in the film “Miss Evers’ Boys,” was a horrendous example of the result of racism, a vulnerable population, and the manipulation of people not given the proper dignity they deserved, to benefit the majority class (Woodard). According to the film, in this study a whole community of African Americans went decades with identified cases of syphilis, being given placebo interventions and unjustifiably told that a later recognized intervention of penicillin shots were too risky for their use. Why would they do this? To gain knowledge; and they viewed the study as a “pure” scientific experiment, a human trial that would likely never be acceptable to have been conducted on Whites of the time, and under the full knowledge and aid of the U.S. government (Woodard, “Miss Evers’ Boys”).
At the very beginning of “Do the Right Thing”, the audience is introduced to an influential song that will be heard throughout the movie called “Fight the Power”. This song, sung by Public Enemy, made a point of calling people out to fight for the equality blacks rightfully deserved. The main character in this movie, Mookie, is a lazy African American boy who works for an Italian-American family in a primarily black neighborhood. He’s a pizza delivery boy and wants to get paid for taking hours to deliver a simple pizza down the block. He has a son named Hector, and while Hector is not in the movie much, it reinstates the fact that Mookie has no ambition to “do the right thing” and support his child and girlfriend, Tina – who is seen at the beginning of the movie dancing to “Fight the Power”, which sets an intense tone for the rest of the film. The man Mookie works for is named Sal and he has two
Does segregation effect you? It may not, but read on to find out who it effects. Segregation affected the characters of the books Teammates and The Other Side. The authors are approaching the theme of color doesn’t matter in similar and different ways .
Director and actor Spike Lee presents his "truth" about race relations in his movie Do the Right Thing. The film exhibits the spectacle of black discrimination and racial altercations. Through serious, angry, and loud sounds, Lee stays true to the ethnicity of his characters, all of which reflect their own individualism. Lee uses insulting diction and intense scenes to show how severe racism can lead to violence. The biases reflected through Do the Right Thing model those of today which has kept society in a constant feud for so long. In Oprah Winfrey's dynamic episode, "The Color of Fear", Mr. Mun Wah projects his strong opinion when he states, " . . . that racism is still going on today, that we've got to stop to hear the anguish and the pain that goes with that and then we'll survive." (3) People do not realize the severity of their own words. In the scenes of the movie that emphasize the shocking reality of failed interracial communication, racial stereotyping, trust or lack of trust, and acrimonious violence mirror the current concerns about race in America as reflected in "The Color Of Fear."
In the novel Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor, Cassie is forced to accept the racial segregation in Mississippi in the year 1933, and she learns the hard life of being an african american child in a country run by white americans. For example, when cassie was in Strawberry she accidentally bumps into Lillian Jean, a young, white girl, she is then forced to apologize to her, and if that was not enough Lillian jean also wants Cassie to get on the sidewalk, so she tries to grab cassie's arm, and she fails the attempt but Mr Simms “caught it from behind, painfully twisting it and shoved me off the sidewalk into the road[...] You ‘pologize to Miz Lillian jean” he says. In my opinion, this was just a terrible thing to do to a young
It is unfortunate that intolerance continues to exist in our nation (or anywhere else for that matter). Racism, one of the largest and most prevalent forms of intolerance, commonly destroys relationships and can eventually lead to violence. The existence of such hateful ideologies is so prevalent in our society that popular culture is constantly trying to challenge the ignorant basis of racial conflict. Spike Lee’s film, Do the Right Thing, connects with this concept of racial conflict that is so foreign to my past. Through the application of my social and political views, I will demonstrate how the film is difficult for myself to relate to and, in my opinion, conveys a misleading message.
Today, the United States is still a racially segregated society. Getting into college is the first step in a student’s postsecondary educational journey, an academically strong start in college is the second because grades can either expand or limit opportunities for successfully completing a college degree . College students face many obstacles throughout their pursuit of higher education. Racial Segregation can affect college academic performance in a variety of ways. Segregation represents a major structural feature influencing success in college. Segregation experienced in childhood can influence later academic performance through a rage of channels. Segregation has other, more contemporaneous influences on academic performance. Massey
Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Martin Lawrence, Bill Nunn, Richard Edson, Roger Guenveur Smith and Spike Lee. Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks.1989. Streaming (Netflix)
Once a school system drops their efforts to integrate schools, the schools in low-income neighborhood are left to suffer; not to mention that segregation in schools leads, not only to the neglect of schools, but the neglect of students as well. Resegregation quite literally divides the public schools into two groups “the good schools”, that are well funded, and “the bad schools”, that receive a fraction of the benefits-- more often than not the groups are alternatively labeled as “the white schools” and “the black schools” (and/or hispanic). Opportunities for the neglected students diminish significantly without certain career specific qualifications that quality education can provide-- they can’t rise above the forces that are keeping them in their situation.
Stratification across the states has created a divide between classes. It has allowed the upper class to solely remain with the upper class, while the working class only associates with the working class. It has caused people to only feel comfortable within their own class. Stratification has allowed people to see others as those to be feared or as those to be ignored. It has also created an unspoken boundary that says it is wrong to associate with another class. In the film, it was evident how the people only felt comfortable to associate with those who were like them. Even more than that, though, it revealed how it was not expected for the classes to intertwine. The system of stratification has created a vicious system that ranks people based on the amount of money they have, instead of valuing people as