"Do the Right Thing" Taught Me What Should Have Been Obvious 30 Years Ago

The following article contains spoilers for Do the Right Thing (1989)

* * * *

If you’re anything like me, your perception of racial inequality in America has probably been a long time coming — and probably has a long way to go. The weeks since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer have been a belated and a woefully deficient crash course in the injustices faced by so many people of color. As a white man, I have scarcely been able to comprehend that racism existed 30 years ago, much less today. I have never felt threatened by the presence of police officers, never been called a racial slur, and rarely find myself a minority in any group. If the past few weeks have taught me to open my eyes to racism, Spike Lee’s 1989 masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, taught me how long I’ve truly been blind.

I watched Do the Right Thing for the first time this week, in preparation for the release of Lee’s latest film, Da 5 Bloods. In a word, the film could only be described as harrowing — and possibly prophetic. For those familiar with the ending, in which an innocent black man is choked to death by a police officer, it is hard to divorce the film from the events of today, specifically the killings of Floyd and Eric Garner in 2014. To me, modern racism has been infrequent and insignificant in scope, but Do the Right Thing is a painful reminder that even our recent history isn’t so rosy.

I doubt that any film or piece of literature will ever allow me to fully understand what it’s like to be black in America, Do the Right Thing is a brief glimpse into the anger and frustration that has existed within the black community for decades. If I ever had any rational reason to believe that discrimination and police brutality are relatively new phenomena, Lee’s film seems to drive home the point that this has always been part of American history — we only know about it now because of cell phone video footage. Lee’s attention to detail suggests the culture playing out on social media has existed for decades as well — he seems to have a rebuttal for the “All Lives Matter” folks, those decrying the destruction of property, and the ineffective white “allies” we all know so well from Facebook.

Do the Right Thing doesn’t advocate for any particular type of activism and actually presents the fight for equality as a futile one. As disheartened as I am by our lack of progress in over 30 years, I am equally inspired by the sudden change we have seen over the past month. While it is certainly better to be late than never, seeing current events play out in a film released before I was born makes it hard not to imagine how many lives might have been saved if we white Americans hadn’t been so slow in acknowledging our own faults and having the humility to accept realities we don’t experience firsthand. 

Each generation likes to believe that they are far more enlightened than the previous ones, but Do the Right Thing makes it clear that in some cases this is little more than lip service and braggadocio. While Lee and others have had the experience and foresight to understand the systemic racism faced by people of color for decades, the rest of us have marinated in stagnation, believing that somehow Martin Luther King Jr. willed equality into existence when he said: “I have a dream.” That dream still falls squarely on the shoulders of this and future generations, because what Lee wrote in the final moments of Do the Right Thing is still absolutely true today — “It’s as plain as day. They didn’t have to kill the boy.”