Cops beating up coloured people for no particular reason. Teenage girls throwing eggs at elder Chinese. Islamic students getting teased at school because of their clothes...Pretty soon you'd start asking yourself, "Why can't we live with our families, and go to our classes, and work at our jobs, and not let racism colonize our minds with suspicion?" The multiple points of view expressed throughout the film "Do The Right Thing" suggests that things are more complicated than black and white; that racism has deeply ingrained in our society and there are no clear-cut ways of solving this ever-present problem. This is because so much of racism is beneath the surface and that it is not just between two sides.
             We were taught in social studies classes that decades ago, a man named Martin Luther King Jr. stood up for the Black Americans and started the Civil Movement, that they were free from segregation laws ever since. But was it really a fairy-tale ending for them? We may not have refused to sit on the same bus or eat in the same restaurant with them, but does that give us a "racism-free" label? We may not recognize ourselves as racists, but in truth people can behave in a racist way without really knowing it or even meaning it. In the film "Do The Right Thing", the Italian pizzeria owner Sal isn't really racist: he gets frustrated when his racist son calls his customers "nigger", he did give a job to Mookie and even has a thing for his sister. Still, he doesn't treat Afro-American overall like he treats whites. For example, there's a wall of fame in his restaurant showcasing different Italian-American people like Frank Sinatra, Al Pacino and John Travolta. They're all respected stars, and, well, they're all white. No Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X. No blacks are to be on Sal's wall of fame. This might not seems as racist given that it is an Italian restaurant, but the...