Can you believe ‘Do The Right Thing’ is 20 years old? The film’s promise of a United States of Black America was a nice fantasy. But now it’s time to welcome Sal back to the neighborhood.

Why Mookie Did the Wrong Thing
By Natalie Hopkinson

When Do the Right Thing was released 20 years ago, a generation of black writers and intellectuals became instantly radicalized by Spike Lee and Public Enemy’s vision of black America. Their fist-pumping black nationalist slingshots, along with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, were the perfect antidote for the isolation and alienation many black youth felt growing up in white suburbs in the post-civil rights era.

Together Do the Right Thing and Chuck D’s single “Fight the Power” made a pitch-perfect argument for a United States of Black America, composed of a constellation of urban outposts like Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, that were free of white patriarchy. USBA was a place where black people owned the restaurants, businesses and schools, and inhabited their own black worlds free of oppression. The film’s fiery conclusion, with the Italian-American Sal’s Famous Pizzeria going up in flames after the police murder of Radio Raheem, was the perfect denouement, a catharsis for every sleight at the hands of white people.

I was only 12 when the movie came out, but the film’s fire ignited my own smoldering resentments. Burn, white supremacists who harassed my family for daring to move to a white suburb of Indianapolis! Burn, cops who followed me and my teenage friends just because! The literal fire set in the film and the social fire that followed was payback for my black classmates who rode deseg buses from the inner city to suburban schools, leading to inevitable culture clashes that we would never win.

The satisfaction that came from that released rage played out for years. I remember a similar feeling just after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the videotaped Rodney King beating, when my friend Nzinga, a Black Panther’s daughter, announced with relish outside our high school lockers: “Niggas is rioting in L.A.”

Uuuuunnmph! Take that, we thought.

Do the Right Thing is still a powerful movie. But today many of the scenes that elicited cheers seem off the mark.

For the rest of the story, click here.