Do the Right Thing (in 250 words or less)

Spike Lee has said that, since Do the Right Thing’s release in 1989, countless viewers have asked him if Mookie did the titular “right thing” by throwing a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria. But, Spike notably adds, a black person has never asked him that question. White peoples’ obsession with that moment illustrates a disproportionate preoccupation with how black people respond to their oppression, and an avoidance of the more difficult, guilt-ridden discussions about the oppression itself. Maybe we white viewers can reframe how we interpret the meaning of the movie’s title. Maybe it’s a challenge to us, a challenge to do the right thing by not choking black boys with nightsticks, to do the right thing by not buying brownstones in black neighborhoods, to do the right thing by not insisting black kids get arrested for harmless pranks, to do the right thing by calling family members out on their blatantly racist behavior, to do the right thing by seeing black people as fully human and not merely consumers of our pizza, to do the right thing by realizing—in spite of the movie’s nuanced and morally complex characters, and in spite of its vibrancy and joy—that undergirding all of it is a systemically racist system that hurts black people. And then repeal Voter I.D. laws. And defund the police. And, maybe while we’re at it, we can do the right thing by putting “some black people on that motherfucking Wall of Fame!” -Matt Denvir