Do The Right Thing

The movie Do the Right Thing is has a lot of symbols of social conflicts, social statuses, race, and stereotypes. One of the most memorable scenes of the movie is the scene when many of the cast members were saying racist comments about other races. I believe this was a powerful scene because most viewers thought it was just a funny scene, but it was the brutal truth that people don’t want to believe is going on but it really is.

            Race and stereotypes in this movie played a major role because the movie was mainly about those two things. One stereotype was the scene when the white guy stepped on the black guy sneakers and it was a big controversy. That symbolized that young men in that era were so conscious of their shoes that they were willing to physical for messing up the guy’s shoes. The stereotype is this scene is black men care more about their shoes than anything and white guys really don’t care about their image. Another scene from the movie was the scene when the guy with the loud boom box went into the pizza parlor and it started a big controversy.

The song that was playing was Fight the Power which was a powerful song for the black community, the owner didn’t like the fact that it was so loud so the owner destroyed the boom box with a baseball bat. Race played a big part in this scene because the guy with the loud boom box and his friend wanted pictures of black people inside the pizza parlor, and the owner wasn’t allowing it and the cops were called it that started a big riot in the neighborhood. During that riot a police officer killed a black man in the middle of the street which caused a uproar in the neighborhood and people began to destroy the pizza parlor, as well as other stores in the area.

Social status was also a big part in the movie because one of the sons of the owner of the pizza parlor thought he was higher up in social status because he wasn’t black. He thought that black people were lazy bums and he didn’t like them at all. But when asked who were some of his favorite people they all were black. One thing he said in the scene was that the black people he liked versus the one he didn’t like were “different”. He couldn’t explain himself because the stereotype that was placed in his mind caused him not to see another perspective of someone else life.

The film was a great movie because these are things that are really going on in neighborhoods that many people have no idea about. Spike Lee was trying to open viewer’s eyes about things going on in rural communities, and how people are being treated on everyday basis. One coincidence of the movie is that one of the scenes happened recently with Eric Gardner who was choked to death in broad daylight by a police officer in New York. It basically shows that in a way history is repeating itself .