Writing New York: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)
Why Doesn’t Our Discourse of Rights include a Discourse of Duties as Well?
Spike Lee’s celebrated 1989 film Do the Right Thing has been one of the staples of the “Writing New York” course that I first taught at NYU in 2003 with my colleague Bryan Waterman. The film responds to a series of racially charged incidents of violence against African Americans in New York during the 1980s, most particularly the death of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, on December 20, 1986.
In the aftermath of #BlackLivesMatter and of all of the racial hate that has become part of public discourse in the US since the election of that once (and hopefully forever) former New Yorker Donald Trump, the film is just as relevant and powerful today as when it was released. Maybe more so.
New York is often described as a “cosmopolitan” city, because it is a city that was profoundly shaped by immigration. In our course, we think about the evolution of cosmopolitanism from an alternative to nationalism — a cosmopolitan is a “citizen of the world” — to a way of thinking about difference.
Originally a universalist response to the particularity of nationalism as the basis for social identity, cosmopolitanism also tempers universalism, which emphasizes sameness, with toleration and pluralism, which emphasize difference. Cosmopolitanism is about seeing difference not as a problem to be solved but rather as an opportunity to be embraced.
Cosmopolitanism is also about learning to adjudicate between the claims of sameness and the claims of difference in any given situation through the idea of conversation: unlike the multiculturalist, who can sometimes be skittish about engaging in conversations or having opinions across lines of difference, cosmopolitans seek out conversations in which they can test their own ideas and assumptions in order to figure out which ideas are better than others.
Sometimes those conversations need to be with the self, taking the form of a form of Socratic irony in which you are both the questioner and the one questioned. And, in our course, we suggest that texts, films, and other forms of art can provide the occasion for this kind of questioning.
One question that we pose in our course—and that Lee poses in his film—is this: Does the history of New York, marked as it as by episodes of racial and ethnic hatred, really bear out the idea that the city is a cosmopolitan place?
Events like the Howard Beach incident suggest otherwise.
After the car in which he was riding broke down on the Cross Bay Boulevard, Griffith and two companions walked three miles to the mostly white neighborhood of Howard Beach in search of a pay phone. At about 12:30 a.m., having already been accosted and insulted by a number of white residents who told them to leave the neighborhood, the three men stopped at a pizza place.
After getting a bite to eat, Griffith and his companions were attacked outside the pizzeria by a group of white youths armed with tire irons and baseball bats. Severely beaten and trying to get away, Griffith ran out onto the Belt Parkway where he was struck and killed by a car.
New York mayor Ed Koch said, “This incident can only be described as rivaling the kind of lynching party that existed in the Deep South.”
In the production journal that he published after the release of Do the Right Thing, Lee wrote:
The idea for Do The Right Thing arose for me out of the Howard Beach incident. It was 1986, and a Black man was still being hunted down like a dog. Never mind Mississippi Burning. Nothing has changed in America, and you don’t have to go down south to have a run-in with racist rednecks. They’re here in Nueva York.
Lee suggested that
the only reason a public disturbance didn’t jump off was because it was the dead of winter. It was just too damn cold for an uprising. But what if a racial incident like Howard Beach or the Edmund Perry and Eleanor Bumpers murders had happened on the hottest day of the summer? That “what if” is the basis of Do The Right Thing.
Do the Right Thing is thus a thought-experiment that poses a powerful question to its audience: you may have the right to do something, but how do you know if it’s the right thing to do?
The film depicts a racially diverse neighborhood, primarily African American, in which Puerto Ricans, an Italian American family, a Korean couple who own the local grocery store, a WASP brownstone-owner, and white cops all play important roles.
The drama in the film erupts around the question of whether Sal (Danny Aiello), an Italian American who owns the local pizza joint, should display pictures of African Americans on his “Wall of Fame,” which honors famous Italian Americans only.
Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a young African American who’s a frequent customer at the pizza place, asks:
Sal, how come you ain’t got no brothers up on the wall here?
Sal invokes the rights of private property:
You want brothers up on the Wall of Fame, you open up your own business, then you can do what you wanna do. My pizzeria, Italian Americans up on the wall.
Buggin’ Out challenges this point of view, pointing out that Sal’s customers are almost all African Americans:
Sal, that might be fine, you own this, but rarely do I see any Italian Americans eating in here. All I’ve ever seen is Black folks. So since we spend much money here, we do have some say.
Sal, the movie suggests, has the right to hang what he wants on his walls, but—given that the pizzeria is also an important community space for the neighborhood—is omitting African Americans the right thing to do?
Buggin’ Out launches a drive to boycott Sal’s, ultimately leading to a violent confrontation, an incident of police brutality, and a riot in the neighborhood.
Part of the neighborhood’s problem is that no one can talk about problems like this one without resorting to shouting or, even worse, racially charged language. The neighborhood’s civil society is impaired because it lacks any sense of civil discourse. Even friends swear at each other and refer to one another as “nigger.”
In one of the film’s signature set pieces (described in the script as the “racial slur montage”), some of the film’s characters do “the dozens”—a ritual of “trash talking” that is an element from African American oral tradition—by insulting different ethnic groups; the African American Mookie insults Italians; the Italian Pino insults blacks; the Puerto Rican Stevie insults Koreans; the white police officer insults Puerto Ricans; and the Korean grocery-store owner insults Ed Koch (and by extension New York’s Jews).
Uncivil discourse is the norm in this neighborhood on a good day, and therefore at a moment of crisis, the neighborhood’s residents lack the linguistic resources to stave off violence through conversation and negotiation. Challenged by Buggin’ Out and the menacing Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), Sal—for most of the film the voice of reason and cross-ethnic and racial sympathy—suddenly spews racist invective, which leads to a riot.
Lee’s film depicts the failure of cosmopolitan conversation in that Brooklyn neighborhood on that very hot day and night.
But it does present a basis for hope. The Koreans are spared the wrath of the primarily African American crowd, which is persuaded by the grocery-store owner’s plea, “Me no white. Me no white. Me Black. Me Black. Me Black.” And the film ends with a quiet conversation that seems to offer the promise of reconciliation and rebuilding.
Do the Right Thing dramatizes the powerful obstacles that prevent the ideals of cosmopolitanism from being realized: not only the politics of racial discrimination, but also the politics that result when the pursuit of rights is not accompanied by the equally vigorous pursuit of duties.
Ultimately, however, it makes a powerful argument on behalf of a cosmopolitan approach to our interactions with others. It suggests that we should be constantly asking ourselves: I have the right to do something, but is it the right thing to do?
Do the Right Thing is available in a definitive 4K restoration on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
Cyrus R. K. Patell is Professor of English at New York University. His most recent book is Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Bloomsbury). www.patell.net.
