Read Chapter 10 on Discrimination. Write a reflection on Spike Lee's film Do The Right Thing. It could be good to reflect on a certain scene or character in the film and what it means to you personally. This will be presented by you in our discussion at the beginning of class next week.
11 comments:
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee was born March 20, 1957 and is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated American film director, producer, writer, and actor, noted for his films dealing with controversial social and political issues.
In “Do the Right Thing” Lee features characters that are forced in living in close proximity to each other with diverse backgrounds. The closeness of the living arrangements and the multitude of diverse backgrounds cause increased stress on the streets every day. The characters maintain their personal space with barriers and throughout the movie these barriers are broken and dealt with. For example, when the one character gets his shoe ran over by a man on a bike. Lee intentional creates additional factors that will interact in the discussions. The man on the bike wore a Larry Bird, Celtics jersey, symbolizing that this man is breaking through as Larry Bird infiltrated the traditionally black-dominated sport of basketball.
Discrimination can be defined in many different ways, but for this discussion I believe it is the prejudicial treatment of a person or a group of people based on certain characteristics. This discrimination can be positive, or negative, behavior directed against a certain group. Unfortunately we deal with discrimination in life everyday and I believe we will for the rest of our lives. People will always have opinions and whether they choose to make judgment with those opinions or keep an open mind will determine the future of discrimination. I believe that it is not just in the United States where discrimination plays a role, it is everywhere.
I remember traveling for the first time to Angola and Algeria. The culture is vastly different than any other culture I am use to and I would have been very easy for me to judge people just by looking at the environment surrounding them. It would also have been easy for them to judge me based on what I was wearing, doing, traveling in, etc. When I first walked down the street to a restaurant with a peer, I was excited to see all the people come out onto the sidewalk and were so interested in asking me questions about me, my life, the United States and many different things. At no point during my time in these two countries did I feel these people needed to be judged or put in a little stereotype box. Traveling has taught me many things about people’s culture and lives.
Actually we judge people and do not even realize we are doing it. We judge people within the first few seconds of meeting them. We take in their appearance, are they pretty, what color are their eyes, what is their hair like, are they short or are they tall and what size are their feet are they Italian, or Norwegian, or Polish or Spanish? Then we filter in on the clothes. What is this person wearing? Are they “brand name” clothes, do they match, are they stylish. Then we speak….. and we now critic their grammar, their syntax (whether what they are saying makes sense), their vocabulary level, their sentences and the topic structure of the sentences. Why are we programmed to do these things?
Egalitarianism (derived from the French word égal, meaning equal) is a political doctrine that holds that all people should be treated as equals, and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights. Generally it applies to being held equal under the law and society at large. (source: Wikipedia)
Our lives are built around judgments which in turn can be considered discriminations. Keeping an open mind is a difficult thing to do but to better ourselves we need to stop passing judgment and take people at what they really are…. Human beings.
"Judging requires that you think yourself superior over the one you judge." (Source: Unknown)
“Judge others by their questions, rather than by their answers.” (Source: Voltaire)
“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” (Source: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
“When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.” (Source: Wayne Dyer)
Due to Spike Lee’s lopsided portrayal of different races, I think that "Do The Right Thing" is one of my least favorite films ever. I understand Mr. Lee is using stereotypes to make us see how over the top we can see other races, but I’m not buying it. This film, like so many other examples of "social enlightenment" from the entertainment industry, is strong in finger pointing and lacking in answers. There is an element in our society that believes that the best way to take on a strong issue, such as discrimination and racism in this case, is to throw a choice few relevant quotes at it in hopes that it will get people thinking. That is all well and good, but what is the point in getting someone to think about a problem without directing that person to act upon it? "Do The Right Thing" is discrimination from one man's point of view and serves no positive purpose in the fight against racism.
Discrimination is something that will not be eliminated in my or my kids' lifetimes. It is infused into every being. It is Human nature. You may say that you are not discriminate in your life, but I believe you aren't being honest with yourself. Whether it be someone being discriminate on the basis of skin color, sexual preference, political affiliation, differences in weight, or clothing that others wear, we all have been discriminate in our lives. It is engrained in our psyches to find what is different among ourselves before looking a little deeper to find what we have in common. I think it's that survival of the fittest mentality. Find what is lacking in your neighbor and exploit it.
I understand there is racism in the world, however does a movie make it go away or help in any sort of effective fashion? I really don't think so. I think that until we start looking inside ourselves and be honest with ourselves, we won't be able to realize the way to eliminate discrimination between us.
One of the things that caught my attention in he movie is when the little girl was drawing on the floor. She was drawing a happy sun, a house, a family together, the American dream”. While she was drawing somebody just step on top of the drawing, and the director shows the same action happening more than once through out the movie. By giving focus and repeating, the director was definitely trying to send a message. Maybe he was trying to say that in he world we leave in now, she won’t probably get what she wants especially in a “bad” neighborhood that there is always some violence, disagreement, and discrimination going on.
Spike Lee is one of the few people (as a film director) that I know that takes on the subject of discrimination. Grant it it’s a sour subject to talk about among like other things but it has to be discussed in some form of way. A person can only tell what’s he/she been through with discrimination by what that person been through or from what he/she see. In Spike Lee movies he tells it how he sees it. Is right or wrong or is that how the world is? No one knows except for the person that lived his or her ethnicity life.
The main thing that bothers me every time I watch the movie is when the “black” man got upset because there wasn’t any “brothers” or “black” people on the Italian restaurant wall. Then boycott the place, well “tried” to. Why? Why do people complain about things that the other ethnic group is doing that doesn’t please them? If a person want something done and want to have it in a certain way then that person should do something about and get it done. I don’t understand why people get upset because a diverse race is doing better than them. My thing is if you decided to do something for yourself and have a positive attitude about the goal then the success will come to play. What I don’t like is when people are lazy and they expect the things done how they want it through others and if it’s not done that way its wrong.
What I thought that was messed up in the movie was how “Moogie” didn’t help the situation at his work place. He knew that his friend was wrong and didn’t do anything at all. Taking anger out, because he wanted to get paid, by letting the situation get to destruction of the property was wrong and now he is out of a job and back to square one. I didn’t see any good that he got out of that. What was the help being behind of the situation and yelling from the back was not going to do nothing at all. Though what the manager did was wrong but he did have the right to beat the dude boom box. If it was my restaurant and he came in with it I would of did the same thing. Because the restaurant was in his neighborhood I guess it gave him the right that he could do whatever he wanted. The older son of the owner of the restaurant was no better in any situation. He thinks that because he is better than the “black” community that he should be some where in the rich community.
From what I see is that everybody is the same. We come in the world the same and we leave the same, we have the same blood cells, the same features of the body. The only difference about us is the way we were raised from the diverse ethnic background. So why are we brought in the world to discriminate with each other? Like the famous words by Rodney King, “Can we all just get along.”
I thought Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing was a very interesting and entertaining film. This film had a lot of great messages and meanings. I though the film showed us there is a mixture of racism all around us. There are some people who take racism in a light hearted way, some who take it to a extreme, and some people who don’t dwell on it. The people in the film that took racism in a light hearted way was sweet Dick Willy and his two friends. Some who took it to a extreme were Sal’s oldest son Pino and Buggin Out (whose name perfectly described him). Then there was one guy who didn’t allow it to effect the way he lived his life such as Da Mayor. The character I found to be so annoying was Buggin Out, he started taking events and situations to new extreme, even though they could have done with a more relaxed level headed manner.
The movie Do the Right Thing is a good example on today’s issue with racism. It is quite evident in the movie that the neighborhood is composed of people from different cultures; this brought some differences, arguments, and problems within the community.
In the movie, there is a scene where Da Mayor stops Mookie, who is on his way to work, and tells him “do the right thing”. Personally, after that moment, I thought that Mookie was going to do something good that was going to change the neighborhood’s perspective. I believed that Mookie was going to do something heroic. At the climax of the movie (when Radio Raheem was killed by the policemen after the tantrum if the pizzeria) Mookie suddenly freezes as he reflects on something. At that moment, I knew he was about to do something drastic. He picked up a garbage can and smashed a window with it, which started a riot as everyone else continued to vandalize the pizzeria and eventually setting it on fire. This really got me thinking; is this what Mookie thought to be the “right thing to do”? Was this the right thing to do? Did the neighborhood come to a better understanding in result of this? Did his action solve the problem, or did it worsen it? I believe this gave the movie a more realistic ending. Sometimes things cannot be changed quite easily. Unfortunately, violence is sometimes the only way to be heard and to get a message across. I believe this is why Mookie thought this was the right thing to do.
-Josue Franco
THe movie "Do the right thing" is a great movie. This movie really makes me think about how much hate there is in this world for no reason. Racism is something that I think will never treuely go away. To me this is sad because I believe it is one of the reasons for all the major issues in the world today. In the movie Pino and Mookie are talking and Mookie asks Pino who his favorite basketball player is and so on. Most f Pino's answers were black men. But then he goes on to explain how those men aren't really black and it's different. I believe that there are alot of people in the world who are racist because they feel they have to be. That makes me sad. I grew up in a very small town and it was mostly white people but there were also black people and some hispanic people. I enjoyed everyone and never really cared what they looked like or how much money their families had. But there were many people who looked down at them and me for being friends. It's so stupid. I don't know I think people are crazy and I feel that somebody who hates everyone that isn't exactly like them is insecure and unhapy to themselves.
Since the movie was produced in 1992, it’s hard to be critical of the content. This is because racism and discrimination was a more serious issue in 1992 than it is today in 2008. Despite this, I thought the movie was more entertaining than it was enlightening. Are the stereotypes portrayed in the movie accurate…yes, to a certain extent! But that’s just one side of the story. What about the side of the story where people don’t judge? What about the side of the story where people CAN get along in the same neighborhood while respecting each other’s different backgrounds? I thought the movie as a whole was too negative and rather than revealing any kind of answer to a very serious social problem, it presented strictly anger and violence as a means to a solution. The quote at the end by Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best…
“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
Therefore, the movie ultimately repudiates everything that Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for.
in do the right thing i saw that spike lee had to play into alot of sterotypes i felt tht the italian people in the movie were kinda screwed over i though sal was a caring person hows temper got the best of him at the end and the younger brother gotta along with spike lee character than he did his own jackass brother and in the case of the older brother he was just an asshole raciest ever race has them i really did enjoy the movie but the ending kinda upset me i really didnt like the way the whole ending went down i didnt like wut spike lees character did with the trash can i didnt like what the jackass with the glasses did coming in after sal kept the it open for the locl kids the cops just made it worse then they began to blame sal like he could control what those asshole cops did no offence i wouldnt like to help out the guy that was just whooping my ass but i also wouldnt want to see him die but i didnt like how sal was blamed for all of it all and all it just seemed like a really bad day for alot of people
The film “Do The Right Thing” is actually one of my favorite movies of all time. The film deals with many issues, some more dominant throughout the plot than others. I also like how the film did not just deal with racism, but also key issues that have become like cancer within the black community. The main one is this unwarranted since of entitlement that is carried by many people within the black community and especially the youth. I think it was represented subtly by the character “Buggin-Out.” That feeling that I’m black and my great grandfather was a slave and since I spend money here I deserve these pictures on the wall. As a black man I understand that feeling and where it comes from, but it cannot be seen as acceptable. The most heated issue throughout the movie deals with racism, but more importantly the anger that stems from racism and how that anger can sometimes be displaced onto the wrong people. I personally believe that racism is like gun powder and all you need is a strong spark to set it off. The issue of this displace anger is especially true of the younger generation. The character “Buggin-Out” is a prime example of this built up anger.
I understand that anger, but too often in life; just like in the movies you don’t see the cause of that anger. I was born and raised in a small town in TN and have many stories I could talk about that deal with racism. The one that comes to mind involves my mother when she was in high school. My county was one of the last districts to integrate schools; we had Carver High which was the black school and Haywood High for white students. One day my brother and I were sitting around talking to our mother when that subject came up. My mother sat and told us about her first day going to school; about arriving on the bus and being surrounded by protesters. She told us about the swearing, and racial slurs, and the spitting. She told us the story to the point that she couldn’t continue because her eyes started to tear up. While I watched my mother’s eyes swell with water, all I could think about was how if my mother is still alive and I have grandparents still alive then the people who cursed and spit at my mother were also alive. For a long time after that story I walked around with a lot of pent up anger, but you get older and wiser and realize that you cannot live life that way. So while I could understand the character’s “Buggin-Out’s” anger, I cannot accept it. Another example of this displaced anger was with the character “Pino.” I do not feel he was truly angry with all black people, but more so about how his friends teased him about serving the black residents of Bed-stuy. And then again maybe he was the victim of this displaced anger from someone black and has not let it go yet? I admire any film willing to deal with the issue of race or racism, because it is a very powerful topic.
I feel the movie had a very powerful ending so I will try to end my response is a similar fashion. The story takes place when I was in 8th grade riding the bus to school. Everyone knew each other on the bus and we would often hang out at each other’s houses and play basketball at least once a week.
We had a friend and his name was Johnny. He was one of the few white kids on the bus, but we all really like him. When we played ball we would alternate whose house we played at every week, but we couldn’t play at Johnny’s house. He was very upfront with telling us that his step father was racist and he wouldn’t allow us over. We respected him for telling us, because we all knew of their relationship on the bus. A lot of time in the morning Johnny would come to the bus arguing with his step father, and sometimes would have fresh black eyes. The story starts at the beginning of 8th grade year and Johnny’s little brother Dustin was starting head start that year. Naturally we all liked Johnny so everyone wanted to meet little Johnny. So, all the kids in the back come introduce themselves and say hi. His little brother was so happy and excited; he was a real sweet kid. Johnny was sitting in the seat in front of me and he placed his brother in the seat across the aisle. Everybody else had said hi, so I went ahead and said hello to him. He was smiling ear to ear excited to meet everyone. Then after I introduced myself I sat back in my seat, then Dustin leaned across to his brother and said “Johnny that’s a Nigger.” Johnny could see that I heard him and he quickly corrected him, but I was just shocked. I couldn’t react because I didn’t know how. I’ve been called that word by people my age and older and I could respond to that, but being called that by a kid hits you in a completely different way. Because he didn’t say that to be malicious or event to make a joke; he said that word because he thought that was what all black people were called. He called me that cause that’s the word his step father uses all the time. Through school all day after that I could not stop thinking about it. I would be talking to some friends then it would pop-in my head again. Somewhere during that day I realized that I had seen the truest form of racism, and it is not some 6’4ft 300 pound white guy with a confederate flag tattooed on his chest. It’s that guy’s kid who is learning racism without even knowing it.
My thoughts about the movie "Do the Right Thing". I thought it really showed how closed minded people can be. Even though I would think that even all the races outside (besides white) would be cool with each other, but some people just have a problem with other people who are not "Their People" But I still see thing like that to day when you go into a all black neighborhood and see a white person most times a girl, and I would hear people mostly woman saying “What’s she doing over here”! I mean Ii don’t think this attitude will ever change. Like in the movie how the different races would call other races different names or even say it in their own languages I don’t think that has changed ether. To me at least people don’t say races things to our faces “as much” anymore. I don’t agree about something’s in the movie. I don’t think Cill’s had to have any African American leaders in his restaurant I mean its like having a little bet of Italy in the neighborhood.
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