Do the Right Thing

Last night we went to a friend's house for one movie of a series they are doing as part of a summer film festival.  We saw Do the Right Thing, which is a summer classic by Spike Lee from 1989.  The movie takes place in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn on one hot summer day.  The first two things that hit me before anything else was the vibrant colors that the production designer used for all the clothes and the number of now major stars who appeared in this movie. 

I don't want to give too much away to the film even though I think I might have been the last person on the planet to have seen it.  The movie highlights the very apparent racial tensions in Brooklyn between whites, blacks, Koreans, and Latinos.  At the end of the movie there are two conflicting quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, which I think have very direct connections to situations in Oakland today.  Obviously the MLK quote was about nonviolence and the Malcolm X quote was about the use of violence (in self defense), but both were directed at achieving justice.  After the film Spike Lee stated in an interview that viewers who question the justification of a riot (in the film) and subsequent destruction of property are implicitly valuing the white man's property over the life of a black man.  I was one of those viewers.  However, I apply my questions to the very recent riots in Oakland, which saw the destruction of property, among which were locally black owned businesses, following the murder black individual by white police officers.  Malcolm X implied in his quote at the end of the movie that in order to bring about change violence is necessary.  I don't agree with this, because in the situation in Oakland as I said in a previous post the violence had the effect of alienating the cause.  Furthermore, often in situations were a mob mentality takes over people are joining the looting/vandalization just for the 'fun' of it.  The type of violence that Malcolm X is advocating is more of a calculated thought out maneuver to make a point, but many of the people in the movie's riot (or even in Oakland or the Rodney King riots) were simply using the riot as a way to get material goods or have fun destroying things.