When the ‘Wrong’ Thing Is the Right Thing

How Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ finds justice—and how network TV took that justice away

The summer of 1989 wasn’t just another summer, despite what Chuck D told us in “Fight the Power.” New York City was hot, and it only got hotter when Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing came out. Chronicling how sweltering, simmering racial tension boiled over on a Bed-Stuy Brooklyn block, the movie finally reaches its climax in the police murder of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Mookie (Spike Lee) throwing a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria. The events, like so many others in the movie, etched themselves into a generation’s memory. But for Hanif Abdurraqib, those events were presented much, much differently—and, as he writes over at LEVEL’s sibling publication GEN, resolving the disparity would loom large over the rest of his life.

Too young to watch the movie on its release, Abdurraqib saw it for the first time on network television. The format was edited for language, but also content: Radio Raheem’s cause of death was never shown, making Mookie’s cathartic eruption seem causeless. Years later, when he finally watched the uncut movie at a friend's house, Abdurraqib found himself shaken by his newfound understanding. “To lose [Raheem] and to see the specifics of the violence visited upon him,” he writes, “was heartbreaking — even if I’d long understood that he didn’t make it to the end of the film alive.”