Analysis Of Do The Right Thing By Spike Lee

“Do the Right Thing” is a film directed by Spike Lee, which was released in 1989. The film takes place in a small predominately African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The protagonist of the film named Mookie works in a pizzeria located in his neighborhood named, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Throughout the film, we see different characters who visit Sal’s pizzeria, including Buggin ' Out, who is a neighborhood local who feels offended when he sees the lack of diversity on the pizzerias wall; which only displays famous Italian-Americans. The lack of African-American culture in the neighborhood leads to a building up of tensions, which eventually explodes into a fight between the owner of the pizzeria Sal, his two sons and the locals.

This problem consisted of excessive use of force on behalf of police departments which resulted in the death of many citizens and one of those citizens, was Radio Raheem. Although, Radio was just a character, the person he was portraying, Michael Stewart, was not. Spike Lee describes how understated Radio’s death was in comparison to Michael Stewards stating that, “…we didn’t have his [ Radio Raheem] eyeballs pop out of his head like Michael Stewards did— [the police and medical examiner] greased his eyeballs and tried to stick them back in the sockets”(pg. 189). This description of the gruesome death of Steward serves to understand why Mookie proceeds to initiate the destruction of Sal’s pizzeria after the police kill Radio while having him in a choke hold. “Note that just three years after this film appeared, the nation witnessed yet another urban disaster when the Los Angeles ghetto as once again set ablaze in the violence following the announcement of Rodney King case” (pg. 186). Note that even in the early 90s there still existed racial tensions between the police department and its citizens, showing that there was still distrust in the justice system, a distrust that is also portrayed in the film. Both the death of Radio and Mookie’s actions were symbolic because it tied a series of conflicts and ideas together. These ideas consisted of not only the boiling point of racial tensions within our country and police brutality, but also the decisions the African-American community had to take regarding doing the right