Do The Right Thing: About Racial Conflict

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The title of the film “Do the right thing” leaves us a question-“what is the right thing and what the wrong one is?” Taking this question, I enter the movie. However, until the end, I got no accurate answer. What the director try to show us, using violent to fight power or not? I have no idea. But from the movie, I did have some points on racial conflict. In the film, Spike didn’t try to prominent the racial and class relation by special processing on the environment and characters, which is usually used by the other Hollywood films. On the contrary, he uses the colony of the black community and a single pizza house opened by the white to shadow the conflicting environment. And the dialogue filled with cursing and yelling showed the racial conflict. Then the character of polices politicalize the conflict. In a hot summer day, everybody in the film seems to live their own life. However, director Spike Lee never wastes time only on showing their leisure life but foreshadowing the latter tragedy of racism. This kind of realistic approach makes the film more striking and stimulating. Most of the film is filled with complaining, quarreling and noisy music. But at the end, everything is gone. The director uses the silence to tell the audiences that he has no idea about how to solve the problem. He asks the audiences to give their own answer. This is how Spike shows us the conflict in the black community. Why does the conflict happen? Spike’s film enlightens me to think. Actually, the black have a strong sense of culture admitting. The value of their culture was widely received by its users, which give the black a sense of culture superiority. Apparently, this kind of superiority now faces the challenge from stronger cultures represented by white culture. The conflict with the white culture makes the black dislike it. That’s why MJ in the film strongly dislikes the

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