Do the right thing

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and touches on a lot of different aspects of life. As much of a problem that police brutality is today it was during the 1980’s as well. The movie has predominantly all black leads except for John Turturro and Danny Aiello as the Italian family and owner of Sal’s Famous Pizza. The part of the movie where they are chanting HOWARD BEACH when BoomBox was unjustly choked to death by a cop, began to make me think. My dad grew up in Brooklyn and Carnarcie, and Queens, and he told me this story about a man who was run down by the mob because he did not belong in Howard Beach.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Michael_Griffith.Howard Beach is an extremely racist area even today, and I’ve had to come to terms with that some people are really affected from the area they are brought up in. That man was Micheal Griffith; a victim of racism. The rest of the movie is dedicated to other victims of racist acts, police brutality, and other sorts of unjustifiable violence.  The end of the movie shows that violence is not the answer to solve all problems. Including quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, I began to realize the true message of this movie. The way that Buggin Out approached problems resulted in more and more violence that did not need to happen, but when Mookie’s sister talks to him, and she says if he expended all of that energy into something more productive, she was right. Martin Lawrence’s character is a very typical member of that crew, he’s like a instigator. Someone that tries to make trouble for no reason. I understood this movie. I felt like Mookie. Mookie does not get caught up in the shit until he is too fed up. BoomBox told him the world is his, but he’s the worst off. He does what he needs to do but is called not a man by his baby momma. Da Mayor was the best character because  you never truly know someone and the things they’ve gone through and you just can’t assume the worst of them.