Reexamining Race in Do the Right Thing
Mookie and the owners of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in a still from Do the Right Thing (The Hollywood Reporter)
Since its release almost forty years ago, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) has often been celebrated by critics for its portrayal of racial conflict. The film, set in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, centers on Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, a white-owned restaurant embedded in the community. As a boycott escalates into violence, the story explores the tension between the pizzeria owners and the neighborhood residents over the course of a single, eventful day. Critics are correct to praise Lee’s depiction of racial conflict between the groups, but existing analysis has a glaring omission: the significance of the Italian-American identity of the restaurant owners.
On the surface, it may seem insignificant to discuss this identity, but the racial history behind it is key to fully realizing Lee’s film. While Italians are understood to be white today, this has not always been the case. Upon arrival in North America in the 1800s, Italian immigrants were classified as nonwhite and were sometimes considered Black, leading to similar marginalization of the migrants and African Americans. In particular, Italians in the United States shared oppression on the basis of skin color—often referred to as “guineas”—and low economic standing and employment. These similarities, while longstanding, did not persist. In the decades following their migration, Italians slowly began to accumulate more wealth, alleviating them of economic prejudices, and became ingrained in American popular culture through the popularization of Italian celebrities and media portrayals of Italian characters in the mid-1900s. Italians even became broadly celebrated nationwide with the establishment of Columbus Day in the late 1800s. Only once these gradual developments in perception and economic standing solidified did Italians come to be accepted as white.
With this past in mind, the role of the Italian American characters in Do the Right Thing becomes more complex. A historical solidarity, or at the very least a similarity, now emerges between African Americans and Italian immigrants. Yet Lee’s film positions Sal and his sons, the owners of Sal’s Pizzeria, at odds with the Black residents of the neighborhood. The conflict between the historical similarities and the present opposition in Italian Americans’ relationship to African Americans then sets up Lee’s film for rich discussion. Critics, however, seem to gloss over this nuance in favor of describing the film simply as depicting a society of “blacks and whites.” Some writers, both at release and more recently, even neglect to mention the Italian identity of the pizzeria owners altogether. While Italians’ current perception as white may make this “black and white” language seem logical, the failure to analyze their identity leaves Lee’s vision unrealized.
To fully realize this vision, viewers can turn to the scene where the racial conflict originates. After Sal refuses to display Black celebrities on the restaurant’s Wall of Fame and insists on “American Italians on the wall only,” one of the neighbors, Buggin Out, calls for a boycott of the restaurant. The tension-filled scene, despite running under four minutes long, perfectly encapsulates the complexity of Italian Americans in the film: They occupy a double-sided role in upholding white supremacy as both a nonwhite minority in the past and as white people in the present.
[Embed: Clip of the “Boycott Sal’s!” scene]
One way in which this role is revealed is through the Italian characters’ assertion of economic position. Economics are highlighted in Buggin Out’s argument for putting Black celebrities on the wall, as he observes that Black residents, not Italian Americans, fund the restaurant with their business, to which Sal says that he can open his own restaurant if he wants to decide on the rules. Sal’s response not only highlights a lack of respect for the neighborhood, in which he is an outsider, but it also speaks to how economic status perpetuates white supremacy. While Sal has accumulated enough wealth to establish his own restaurant, his Black neighbors—Italians’ formerly racially aligned group—seemingly have not. This success, for Sal and Italian Americans more broadly, is dependent on Black customers, yet their success only serves to uplift the prosperity of the white characters and suppress the Black characters as economically inferior, marking a betrayal of past racial similarities that persist in the present.
The Italian characters further inferiorize their African American counterparts through microaggressions. In the boycott scene, Sal threatens to “bust” Buggin Out’s head with a baseball bat, and his son Pino insists that Mookie—a Black resident and Sal’s employee—resolve the issue with some “brother talk.” Sal’s threat symbolizes how white people assert and maintain dominance over Black people, often through violence, while Pino’s invocation of “brother talk” seeks to define Black people and their dialect as othered from the supposedly superior Italian Americans. Sal and Pino’s verbal treatment of the Black characters highlights an upholding of white superiority that is historically tied to their previous nonwhite status. These acts of othering—ones that Italian immigrants once experienced—are a direct result of their whiteness, but can be better understood as something even deeper: the securing of their whiteness with the knowledge that they once lacked the privileges that it provides. Essentially, they feel a need to oppress the Black characters because they are white, but also because they need to maintain their potentially fragile status as white.
Ironically, the historical similarities between Italian Americans and African Americans are still present in their acts of oppression. Both groups display a great sense of pride in the boycott scene, seen in Sal’s insistence on displaying only “American-Italians” and Buggin Out’s comment to Mookie to “Stay Black!” in the face of marginalization. In Sal’s case, his pride in the wall is especially relevant given celebrities’ role in shifting Italians’ racial perception to white, highlighting the importance of not just his Italian identity but how this identity has transitioned into whiteness. Sal even goes so far as to emphasize this transition by describing the portraits as American first rather than Italian, marking a deviation from the typical term of “Italian American” and underscoring how this pride ultimately serves to solidify his whiteness by prioritizing his status as an American.
Both groups also use dialects or languages that set them apart from others around them, with Mookie’s “brother talk” and Sal’s family speaking Italian. With the derogatory term “brother talk” in particular, a hypocrisy is revealed. Although Pino attempts to oppress Black people for using a dialect that, in his eyes, deviates from the apparent norm of English, Sal’s family speaks a different language themselves, one that originates from Italian Americans’ history of immigration. This parallel illuminates how the film’s racial conflict stems from similar, yet conflicting, pride in marginalized identities, as both groups communicate in ways American society may deem abnormal. Despite the negative perceptions both of these communication forms can have in the mainstream culture, only one group seeks to use this as a point of discrimination, forsaking past racial connections. In other words, even as Italian Americans oppress their Black neighbors, they do so in a way that is rooted in parts of their shared nonwhite past they still possess, like language.
From the prejudiced and parallel behaviors of Do the Right Thing’s Italian Americans, audiences can take away that Italians’ nonwhite history has lasting effects on their current status as white. More importantly, though, viewers can recognize a striking sense of betrayal in how they now treat African Americans, a racial group they were once so intertwined with. For decades now, critics have failed to recognize this nuance. Lee’s film is certainly interested in dissecting a white-versus-black dichotomy, but by specifically depicting Italian Americans as the white persons of interest and even framing the conflict around this identity through the Wall of Fame, he is signaling that it is supposed to be a focal point of discussion, yet it rarely has been. Only through the consideration of Italian identity can Lee’s film be properly examined, and his deeper argument about the trickling effects of racial history on present-day oppression and racial betrayal can be realized.
Works Cited
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California State University, MA Thesis, scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/kd17cv29h.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Do the Right Thing review – Spike Lee's towering, timeless tour de force.”
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Canby, Vincent. “Spike Lee Tackles Racism In ‘Do the Right Thing.’” The New York Times, The
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Do the Right Thing. Directed by Spike Lee, Universal Pictures, 1989.
Gans, Herbert J. “Race as Class.” Contexts, 1 Nov. 2005, pp. 17-21.
Phillips, Kendall R. “Race and Ethnicity: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.” Controversial
Cinema: The Films That Outraged America. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008, pp. 86-126,
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Sterritt, David. Spike Lee’s America. Polity Press, 2013.
Finn Brown is a sophomore at Columbia College studying Economics and Film & Media Studies. When not using his AMC Stubs Premiere membership, he likes going for runs in Central Park, trying new cafes, and shopping for vinyl records. @finns.browns