DO THE RIGHT THING Decoded. No Easy Theses, No Simple Solutions

The heat pours from the sky, reflects off the street pavement, and from the early hours of the morning, it warms the entire neighborhood to an unbearable temperature, exhausting both body and mind. This sets the scene for one of the most important films in the history of Black American cinema, which remains an anti-discrimination classic to this day, addressing racism and the portrayal of African Americans in society and culture with a rebellious freshness. Do the Right Thing is probably the most significant film in Spike Lee’s entire career—a figure who himself is an icon of African American emancipation, with a body of work that defies stereotypes and conventional approaches to the subject of racism in film.

His second work is a manifesto film aimed at social segregation, a grassroots voice of dissent, and at the same time, a perspective on racism that overturns canonical, hierarchical views. As it turned out shortly after its release, and still remains true in 2024, Lee’s rebellious work touches on the essence of the issues it portrays and—sadly—has not lost its relevance.

For the sake of clarity, I should note that in this text, I undertake an analysis of the film, discussing key elements of its plot—so be warned of spoilers.

In Do the Right Thing, Lee shows the everyday life of Brooklyn, where the local micro-community lives through the same routine day after day, sweating in the summer heat from dawn to dusk. Everything happens in a familiar, lethargic rhythm, lazily and accompanied by complaints—as laborious as it gets on a hot day. In this nonchalant way, Lee paints a picture of the realities of a poor New York neighborhood—most residents spend their day wandering around, gossiping, arguing, or goofing off. Most residents are unemployed and young.

Most residents are Black. At the heart of their urban microcosm, two small businesses operate, both run by “outsiders”—a convenience store opened by a Korean couple and, of course, the Italian Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Most of the story revolves around the pizzeria, which seems—somewhat paradoxically (or perhaps not at all)—to be the center of life in this Brooklyn micro-community.

Lee portrays the environment with meticulous realism, while also balancing on the edge of satire. His film is populated by characters that are more or less exaggerated, often embodying stereotypes—the work-shy African American in Lycra, the hot-tempered Italian, the talkative Black elder, the neighborhood loudmouth, and so on. The vices, both real for certain groups and those invented or exaggerated by popular culture, are used in Do the Right Thing to characterize American racial and class relations. Lee spares no irony-laden criticism for his characters, but above all, he strikes at the cultural normalization of tensions and aggression. He takes on the task of bringing to the screen a real cauldron of tensions and presents it in a somewhat ambiguous form of satire, showing a grassroots view of what can be called the condition of the Black community in the USA. He weaves a cinematic tale that imperceptibly crosses the invisible line between comedy and drama, combining experiences of structural relationships into a bitter but not humorless social commentary.

The director uses a polyphonic narrative convention in Do the Right Thing, creating a complex panorama of the Brooklyn “block” through intertwining stories of its individual residents. For most of the film, these are loosely interwoven micro-narratives, occasionally coming together, not so much driving the plot forward as subtly painting the context of the situation, whose deepening essentially replaces the main intrigue. All these threads ultimately converge, forming in the climax a meticulously constructed critique of both institutional and everyday racism from seemingly unrelated elements. The central narrative drive—though this only becomes clear by the film’s end—is the tension between Buggin’ Out, one of the Black customers of the pizzeria, and its owner Sal, over the “Wall of Fame,” which, according to Buggin’ Out, lacks African Americans.

A seemingly trivial argument escalates by evening into a tragic conflict when Radio Raheem, a towering boombox enthusiast, gets involved. His intervention leads to a physical confrontation and a fatal police intervention. To understand the significance of the film, it’s best to look at these parts individually, from which the whole emerges.

Mookie

The central character in the film is Mookie, played by the director himself—a young man working at Sal’s pizzeria who drags himself through the sun-baked streets with an eternally tired or jaded expression (it’s hard to tell which).

Mookie ties all the other narrative threads together—his extended pizza deliveries (he works as a delivery boy at Sal’s) create opportunities for encounters with all the other, often more static, characters. It is his movement, though seemingly sluggish, that sets Mookie apart from his neighbors. He is one of the few Black people shown on screen who has a steady job, situating him in a specific social position—intermediary, mediating between Sal and his sons (who possess wealth and the social advantage it generates, a kind of power) and the Black people who frequent the pizzeria. Additionally, the bravura performance by Lee creates a Mookie who embodies the first stereotype presented in Do the Right Thing—the sluggish Black worker who is more often slacking off than actually working.

This situates him in an ambiguous light and makes him an intriguing protagonist with a fairly fluid characterization, juggling class affiliations and ethical stances. In other words, Mookie is a relatively flexible person, capable of taking on many potential roles, and it is for this reason that he is the leading protagonist of Do the Right Thing. The titular call to “do the right thing” is directed specifically at him (the words are spoken to him in the morning by the Mayor, then still sounding like the trivial “wisdom” of an aging drunk), as a representative of a group balancing on the edge of various social roles for (Afro)Americans. Over the course of that fateful day, Mookie will have to take a stand, choose the right stance in response to the evil his micro-community experiences.

He will also have to confront his approach to life—a strategy of avoidance, of fleeing from responsibility.

Sal

Sal is the leading white character in the film, and simultaneously its protagonist and antagonist. The Italian-American businessman who has run the pizzeria in the Black neighborhood for years is a person seemingly free from prejudice, at times strict but fair, and often playing the role of the voice of reason amidst the shouts of hot-headed young men. However, he also has a darker side—aware of his advantage, stemming from owning the popular establishment, over the local community, he sometimes loses his temper, and his benevolent facade gives way to the threat of violence.

On the one hand, one could say that Sal is simply defending what is his, but on the other, it is hard not to see in his boastful statement, “In my place, I am the boss,” a conviction rooted in a hierarchical structure of his superiority. This also comes to light in the key scene of the film, when, agitated by the confrontation with Buggin’ Out and Raheem, he utters the n-word, which has been lurking at the tip of his tongue, and as the owner, he destroys someone else’s property, provoking the tragic conclusion of the story. Sal’s attitude is also ambiguous in his relationship with Mookie. He treats him with clear affection, says he sees him as a son, but it could be suspected that his attraction to Mookie’s sister plays a role in this.

This, in turn, would reveal a patronizing and self-serving attitude of the pizza specialist towards his neighbors, especially since he admits at one point that the Black neighborhood is an easier market for him. Sal symbolizes the white middle class in Do the Right Thing—a minority that appears friendly on the surface but is in fact misled by its own class interest and adopts racist thinking frames—patronizing, feeling superior, and justifying violence (both symbolic and physical). As someone who comes into direct contact with African Americans, he embodies the entire white community for them, even if he cannot be blamed for all its wrongs. He is the immediate opponent against whom the young people from the streets rebel—so he suffers for both his own sins and those of others, as well as for negligence.

Radio Raheem

Silent and imposing, Raheem proudly strides through the sweltering streets, marking his presence and symbolic dominance over the neighborhood with the sound of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power playing on a loop from his boombox. Though enigmatic, this hulking figure is a key and iconic character in Do the Right Thing. His significance stems from two key aspects: first, his monologue about love and hate, delivered to Mookie, where Lee, through the words of Bill Nunn, explicitly expresses the film’s philosophical message about the inseparable intertwining of extreme emotions and the looming threat of violence within the Black community in the United States.

The second reason Raheem’s role is pivotal lies in the climactic events—his confrontation in the pizzeria and the attack on Sal, which tragically ends with a police officer’s baton on his throat and a heavy thud as he falls to the pavement. Raheem’s fate, as a fictional representative of all victims of police brutality—like Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller Jr., Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, and Michael Stewart, to whom the film is dedicated—reveals structural inequalities and exposes the underlying power struggle in which all the characters are engaged. For a young man from a poor, ethnically and class-stigmatized neighborhood, the ostentatious flaunting of rap, deeply rooted in his streets, was a performance of ownership over space, an assertion of his agency and independence.

Destroying the radio struck at the core of Raheem’s fundamental feelings, and the police’s brutal reaction to his outburst of anger proved that he ultimately did not possess the rights he proclaimed. In his confrontation with Sal, Raheem, who symbolically manifested his agency, clashed with the physical manifestation of power—faced with the destruction of his emblem of strength, he turned to real violence, but this was a gesture doomed to fail as he encountered the brutal, hostile machinery of systemic “law and order.” In Raheem’s tragic story, Lee captures the drama of minorities doomed to both inflict and endure violence, desperately trying to carve out their place in society. He doesn’t portray them as spotless martyrs but shows them as ordinary people, with flaws and virtues, who humanly experience injustice.

Vito and Pino

In a completely different way, Sal’s sons, Vito and Pino, who work with him at the Famous Pizzeria, must grapple with their heritage. Condemned to the family business, they adopt opposing attitudes toward their situation and, consequently, the surrounding African American community. The younger Vito is friends with Mookie, seems gentler and more open, enduring jibes and verbal aggression from Pino. Pino, on the other hand, is openly hostile towards the work he despises and the customers—he is the one who hurls racist remarks with sincerity, revels in his small (or even half) step of class superiority, and escalates aggression in several moments, which Vito and Sal try to avoid.

The young Fragione brothers are essentially two faces of the same stance, a stance of white individuals unconsciously absorbing racist prejudices and a sense of superiority inherited from previous generations, to some extent detached from the real problems and situations of the people among whom they live. Vito adopts a more conscious, reflective approach, genuinely offering hope for a dialogue based on respect and potential change. However, he lacks the will and courage to stand up to his brother’s aggression, becoming an involuntary witness who squanders his chance to act. In this sense, Vito and Pino represent two aspects of Sal himself—empathetic and looking beyond prejudices, yet simultaneously susceptible to impulses rooted in the internalized sense of superiority that comes with class and ethnic identity. The brothers thus showcase two potential outcomes—hope and its absence in the context of changing social antagonisms.

Buggin’ Out

Buggin’ Out, played by Giancarlo Esposito, is largely responsible for the escalation of tensions in Do the Right Thing. A loudmouth, not always the sharpest, constantly scheming and looking for an argument, he initiates the tragic conflict over the “Wall of Fame” in Sal’s pizzeria and then roams the neighborhood, urging everyone to boycott the businessman who refuses to honor Black heroes. Buggin’ Out leverages fragments of the anti-racist freedom discourse, but as Jade points out in one scene, his activist zeal blinds him to the bigger picture, and his engagement takes on caricatured forms.

However, Lee does not dismiss the impulsive actions rooted in sentiments very similar to those of the oppressors. It is, after all, due to Buggin’ Out that Raheem (one of the few convinced to protest) shows up at the pizzeria in the evening with his boombox. By portraying these particular, pseudo-radical, and prejudiced forms of resistance in a somewhat satirical light, Spike Lee does not invalidate the sense of injustice that gives rise to them, but rather points out the dead ends of such attitudes.

The Mayor

The proud nickname of an old man hides an unflattering truth—the Mayor is the neighborhood drunk, sweeping the sidewalk for a dollar, wandering around, ready to dispense life wisdom to anyone (such as always doing the right thing) and flirting with the Mother Sister, who constantly scolds him.

Beyond his satirical function, the Mayor plays the role of a fallen, dusty authority figure whom no one listens to—neither when he’s spouting platitudes nor when he calls for everyone to come to their senses during the final brawl. However, the broken old man also represents the older generation of African Americans who grew up without full rights and during the dark days of structural racism in the USA. His tattered, dirty clothes seem to testify to the damage caused by decades of officially discriminatory policies by white Americans against the Black community—the Mayor in Do the Right Thing can be seen as the most glaring example of a recurring theme in the film: the deep erosion of African American self-worth, burdened by a legacy of neglect, prejudice, and stereotypes, which subsequent generations have adapted and internalized as their own identity.

Collective Character

It is precisely the deep entrenchment of auto-stereotypes and the image of brash, noisy hooligans that seems to be represented by the group of young African Americans (Ahmad, Cee, Punchy, Ella) lounging on the steps, prone to provocation and fun on the verge of breaking the law. In an older variant, similar inclinations are shown by Willie, ML, Sid—a kind of quasi-comedic chorus occupying folding chairs on the corner, commenting on everything and everyone around them. Neither the young nor the old shy away from making ribald remarks about themselves and their brothers, placing themselves ambiguously in relation to the prejudices against the Black community.

Both groups in Do the Right Thing serve as a synecdoche for the collective character, which is the entire politically disengaged African American community, sustaining the status quo. Spike Lee also directs his critical edge at them, seemingly “reflecting” the film’s titular call to action toward these very attitudes—one cannot break the oppressive reality by accepting the roles it imposes.

Tina and Jade

In Do the Right Thing, male characters predominantly take the spotlight, yet there’s a noticeable semi-feminist accent introduced by Lee through the two women close to Mookie—his sister Jade and his girlfriend Tina (with whom he has a child).

Although their roles are somewhat minor, they echo the themes from Lee’s earlier film, She’s Gotta Have It, which critiqued gender norms and societal conceptions of the female body. While Jade and Tina don’t have the opportunity to emancipate themselves as Nola did in that film, both represent female agency that resists male dominance, although they ultimately remain its victims. This is most evident in Jade’s ambiguous visit to Sal’s Pizzeria—while she flirts with the older man, asserting her independence (by dismissing her brother’s protective instincts), her behavior seems a strategy forced by the social hierarchy. Tina’s situation highlights patriarchal conditioning even more clearly; she’s stuck at home with their child while Mookie roams the streets.

Her determination and energy break away from the archetype of the waiting Penelope, but ultimately, Tina remains confined to her roles as a mother and lover. The inclusion of these female characters enriches Do the Right Thing with an additional layer of social division—beyond class and race, it also addresses gender—completing the portrayal of a micro-community entangled in these complex intersections. The characters of Jade and Tina also complicate Mookie’s character, introducing another dimension to the film’s title—it’s not just racism that needs to be challenged but also the ingrained habit of patriarchy. It’s worth noting that, despite her relatively small role in *Do the Right Thing*, Rosie Perez, who plays Tina, makes a powerful impact from the film’s very beginning with an energetic dance sequence during the opening credits.

Dancing—how could it be otherwise?—to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, Perez’s performance sets the film’s tone as a manifesto, a spontaneous expression of the anger of the marginalized. It’s no accident that a female character delivers this emblematic performance.

Smiley – Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

The last character I’d consider significant in Spike Lee’s film is Smiley—a disabled, stuttering young man who sells hand-colored photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Smiley is the third person who enters the pizzeria that evening with Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out to demand that photos of Black heroes be hung on the “Wall of Fame.” It’s no coincidence, as Smiley clearly idolizes these two murdered legends and seems to be their unusual apostle. However, his involvement in the protest isn’t only due to his admiration for these figures—earlier, Pino had driven him away and almost beaten him for trying to sell a photo (a scene that also starkly shows Sal’s negligence in curbing his son’s aggression). Humiliated, likely not for the first time, Smiley turns somewhat naively and childishly to the symbols of Black liberation—his faith in their legacy is both touching and, in a sad way, hopeless.

To Fight, or to Conquer Evil with Good?

The two figures in Smiley’s photos are the final, absent heroes of Do the Right Thing. Both represented radically different approaches to the fight for equality and freedom—King advocated for love, respect, and peaceful methods, while Malcolm X was associated with radical movements, often justifying violence as a means of combating a discriminatory system. Yet, they are pictured together. Similarly, they appear together at the film’s conclusion, with their opposing quotes on violence in the fight against racism (King condemning it and Malcolm affirming it) placed side by side. Spike Lee brings these two poles together, presenting them as a complementary ideological symbol. The tension and fragile balance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings and Malcolm X’s rhetoric frame the narrative from which the central message of Do the Right Thing emerges.

The core idea is expressed in one of the film’s most recognizable moments, where Radio Raheem directly explains to the camera his theory of the world’s perpetual struggle between love and hate (represented by the gold rings on his right and left hands). This scene, a nod to The Night of the Hunter (1955), introduces the symbolism of the fight between good and evil within human nature into Do the Right Thing. Here, good is represented by respect, understanding, and the bonds that connect the characters, while evil is embodied by prejudice, hatred, and racism. Raheem’s clenched fists symbolize how love and hate coexist, creating a society that is dramatically complex, caught between good and evil.

The interlocked fingers of Raheem’s hands symbolize the balance between these two forces, and when the hands separate, two opposing forces are unleashed. Lee emphatically suggests that good is born at the cost of evil and that life is marked by violence and suffering. In this world, fraught with contradictions, a person can strive for balance but, when pushed to the limit, must choose—whether to resist oppression or submit to it. To fight, or to conquer evil with good. Lee offers no answer. Instead, he shows how emotions escalate in a crisis, how violence begets violence, and how seemingly innocent prejudices or stereotypes turn into harm.

What Did Mookie Do?

Ultimately, Mookie turned his back on his employer and joined the crowd’s anger, responding symbolically to his friend’s death by initiating the looting with the act of throwing a trash can through Sal’s pizzeria window. He sided with the fight and Radio Raheem’s clenched left fist. The next morning, he does something that might be seen as audacious—he shows up to ask his boss for his back pay. Though Sal angrily throws more money at him than he’s owed, Mookie takes only what is rightfully his according to their agreement. This decisive moral stance is not just about choosing to resist but also about refusing to be denied his rights or accept a contemptuous gesture.

In a world where the police killed Raheem while on the job, Mookie, who smashed his employer’s window, still gets paid for delivering pizzas—he did the work, so he gets paid. There is no symmetry here, and one can argue about the moral correctness. But Mookie ultimately decides that in the face of inequality, violence is his only recourse. His balancing act, his passive submission to reality and its rules, has run its course.

The action in Do the Right Thing is set over exactly 24 hours—from morning to morning, with a scorching hot day and an equally heated night in between (from both the weather and the emotions). The neighborhood that slowly wakes up in the morning serves as a frame for Spike Lee’s film, emphasizing its bitter tone. Despite all that happens in between, everything looks as if nothing has changed. In this context, the film portrays the daily routine of a poor neighborhood, where hatred, violence, and tragedy are normal parts of reality, ingrained in the inherited order of things passed down through generations. The characters seem to be trapped in a vicious cycle with no escape. Do the Right Thing can be read as a cry of helplessness, calling for a break from this impotence, but also showing how difficult this task is, as even a revolt seems like a predictable event that the social system can easily handle, restoring the status quo.

In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee created a kind of ideological manifesto while avoiding easy theses or a single narrative. He condemns racism but sees it as a complex problem, involving the problematic nature of various strategies for both internalizing and combating it, while also strongly criticizing the perpetuation of racist discourses and their acceptance or deflection onto others. In one of the film’s best scenes, Lee offers us a montage of characters of all ethnicities hurling racist slogans and insults directly at the camera. This is a clear warning message that while racism painfully affects African Americans and is mainly revealed in structural ways against them, it is not unidirectional—any hatred is a threat.

By problematizing this issue, Lee also subtly introduces a rather leftist critique of class structure, where prejudices are also rooted. Here, not only skin color matters but also the thickness of one’s wallet. Racism is not just the result of prejudice but perhaps primarily a product of a certain social system, one of the tools of segregation.

Lee presents all these elements in a way that’s almost nonchalant, devoid of didacticism or agitational zeal. He simply shows us an ordinary day in Brooklyn. In the ordinary lies the essence of Do the Right Thing, which ultimately submerges even the most dramatic tensions in the stagnation of a community still stuck in the same cycle of actions and routines. Was Mookie changed as he left with his paycheck, or did he simply return to his routine? Did anything really change in the overall picture of the neighborhood? The bitter punchline delivered by Lee is voiced by DJ Love Daddy: It’s gonna be even hotter today. The emotions have subsided, the blood has been spilled, and the glass has shattered—but the overall structure of class-race relations remains the same. A lot happens in one sweltering day, but in the end, nothing really changes.