Do The Right Thing Analysis

In Ghost, Sam Wheat, a murder victim, fights desperately to both avenge his murder and to prevent the killing of his love interest, Molly. Sam enlists the aid of Oda Mae Brown, a sassy Black clairvoyant. Oda Mae appears as a con-woman who uses her supposed inherited ability of foresight and spirit channeling as quick earning cash schemes. However, Oda Mae encounters Sam’s ghost who pleads for her assistance. For the duration of the film, Oda Mae serves as Sam’s physical embodiment on the earthly plane. She is used at his behest and will. Her character witnesses little development beyond her relationship with Sam. In traditional Magical Negro fashion, Oda Mae performs Sam’s every command. Willingly, she commits identity fraud in which a $4 million

The film depicts the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominately Black neighborhood. Mookie, Spike Lee’s character, is employed at the neighborhood’s Italian pizzeria, Sal’s, where he complains of both the lack of Black employees at the restaurant and absence of Black history in the pizzeria. Sal’s features a myriad of photos of Italian-American figures known as the “Wall of FAME”, such as Frank Sinatra, but refused to adorn the wall with a Black-Americans of significance. The climactic scene of the film begins with a confrontation by some of the neighborhood’s youth, specifically Radio Raheem, a large framed well over six feet tall Black male. Raheem carries his trademark boom box into Sal’s in protest of the false “Wall of Fame”, but is called a nigger leading to a physical altercation. As the altercation continues, police officers arrive, disperse the fight, and subdue Raheem by locking him in an unrelenting chokehold. Raheem is killed, setting off a riot in the neighborhood that results in the destruction of Sal’s

Specifically, some critics disapprove of Mookie’s decision to throw a garbage can into Sal’s window inciting the riot. However, to suggest the all Blacks would use the film as justification for supposed riots highlights the social and political priorities of white audience of the film. They rather discuss the destruction of Sal’s Pizzeria and thus Sal’s capitalist American dream that he is entitled to. The riot creates more controversy and outrage than the unnecessary death of an innocent man. Critics do not discuss the tragic murder of Radio Raheem and the pertinent issue of police brutality and abuse of authority in inner city neighborhoods. Further, this notion is just ludicrous. Criticism of Do the Right Thing focuses on the culpability of the Black residents of Bed-Stuy for having created their neighborhood’s destruction, without commentary on Sal’s reactionary and racist attitudes against the Black customers that he services. Further, Do the Right Thing became the first film to tackle urban race-relations in a manner that catered to understanding the Black perspective of racial norms, which was not a Blaxploitation film. To this end, the film provided a then contemporaneous depiction of the struggle for social justice in United States’ inner city neighborhoods, which ironically remerged as a