This week is the twentieth anniversary of the release of SPIKE LEE’s seminal and most controversial film ‘Do The Right Thing’. The critics accused LEE of promoting riots among African-Americans across the nation, especially here in New York City.
At the time, we were still smarting in this here town from the wounds of racial strife. There were the blatant incidents of fatal excessive force used by the police and the polarizing cases like TAWANA BRAWLEY’s alleged rape and MICHAEL GRIFFITH’s murder from a lynch mob that gave Blacks so much angst and tension.
On the flip side there was the Central Park Jogger case, which occurred only a couple of months prior to the film’s release and was a tremendously raw open gash on our collective city psyche. The Central Park jogger case was particularly jarring to me because it was clearly designed as a reaction to the assumed threat of young, Black teenagers. I was so enraged by the coverage of that case by the New York Times because they printed the suspects names and addresses, even though they all were all children under 16 yrs old.
These suspects reminded me of myself and my friends during high school. By this time I was living on my own, away from my parents, in an apartment in Corona Queens. The suspects in the Central Park jogger case were like the young teenagers that attended Brooklyn Tech, Graphic Communications and Park West high schools who were current members of the Decepticons. There was no way these kids committed this crime because I knew that I wouldn’t have and I would have been one of the guys leading that wolfpack.
There was nothing that I would not have stolen back then, and NO ONE that I wouldn’t have robbed, but in no stretch of the imagination would we have raped a woman, especially a white. Not only would I not have done that, I would have taught the kids that followed me the same thing, just like Megatron taught me there was some shit that I should NEVER do, both for practical reasons and because, believe it or not, the Decepticons had ethics. You can believe that last line, or not, but believe that we didn’t just do dumb shit for the hell of it because that would result in police attention and then someone being arrested which would end up with more people being arrested due to guilt by association. The zero sum gain was to be avoided.
‘Do The Right Thing’ was vindication for the Decepticons because the controversy of the movie illustrates that property loss is valued over the life of a Black male. Later that summer SoundWave and I attended the Greekfest at Virginia Beach. We were part of a riot that swept over the city for several days until the National Guard arrived to shut the bullshit down. If there was a riot spawned by the movie, then it was started by college kids who felt abused that property was valued at a higher level than they were. Plenty of property was damaged during that Labor Day weekend event. I’m sure that part of my destructive attitude was influenced by the movie and the recent death of YUSUF HAWKINS by a lynch mob in Bensonhurst.
SoundWave and I were just 19 and 18 years old respectively, but we were both savvy New York City teenagers who worked full-time day jobs. SW was a trading assistant on Wall Street for Oppenheimer, while I was an apprentice draftsman under the rabbi and architect from Sheepshead Bay. I call my boss the rabbi because he was a teacher, first and foremost. He literally paid me to learn from him and he even sent me to college with his own money so that I wouldn’t have to take a loan. The rabbi was directly opposite of the racism and classism that existed in NYC and he eventually convinced me that I had no opportunity for advancement in the streets.
The point that I make by mentioning the rabbi here is that he understood everything about why I was so temperamental and so dissuaded from believing that I could really have a stake in my future. Because he was an astute teacher, he recognized how important mainstream information was in the programming of people’s minds and their overall outlook. The climatic scene in ‘Do The Right Thing’ has SPIKE LEE’s character destroy the one thing in his community that was central to all those within it because he feels he has no stake in his future. The SPIKE LEE character was diametrically opposed to the eldest son of the shop owner. Both characters felt trapped in their lives and in their skin.
The rabbi helped me to see that I wasn’t trapped in my skin any more than that if I believed it. The rabbi taught me that working and learning were the only way to insure that I could create a future for myself where I would be more valuable than property. Racism and classism will always exist because of the profit they generate for supremacy. However, the schisms those isms created can be surmounted, but not without a commitment to progressively making oneself smarter and better. One must work though, tirelessly and sometimes thanklessly, to transcend the world’s negativity. The rabbi had a faith in me that I would choose to ‘Do The Right Thing’.
