What Is Right and Wrong?
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Film: Do the Right Thing (1989)
Written and Directed by: Spike Lee
Starring: Rosie Perez, Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, John Turturro
(The acting in this movie is superb.)
Attn: Reader: *Mookie is the main character of the film Do the Right Thing, and he is played by Spike Lee.
First Things First, Mookie,
You know you look like Harry Connick, Jr.? Harry Connick, Jr. is white, but he has very similar lips to you, Mookie. I think you and Harry Connick may share an ancestor or something like that. You know how this crazy America is. All kinds of mixing and moving and we all come from Africa, and so sometimes we have brothers who we didn’t know we had.
Second things second, Mookie. I used to be real mad at you when I watched this movie you’re in, Do the Right Thing. I used to get all sad about your behavior toward your boss, Sal, who owns Sal’s Famous Pizzeria because he’s real nice to you, and you end up just using him for money. What’s that about—is that how you treat a guy who helps you pay your rent and loves you, Mook?
But then, I got older, see. We all get older. We live more of life. We see more of situations. We have a more, let’s say, kuhlyde-oh-skopp-ick view of stuff. We start to understand the inter-dimensionality of all human existence, and how time is not linear, and how what happened in the past affects us today, and how the future is already a vibration we’re living into existence, and how the souls we meet on this materialistic plane are souls we met in other lifetimes and dreamlands and dimensions of reality when we were wearing different outfits for church on Sunday, and we know the structures we build around us are all just tepees or will be tepees again. So we walk barefoot, gently, on the earth and we remember and we let stuff go.
Now, Mookie, you are a creation of a man named Spike Lee, who made the movie you star in, so I know I’m talking to both of you here, but I also know—cause I teach English literature, bro!—that the character and the author are not one and the same. People always get this fact mixed up, if they want to throw you in a court case or something. They suggest your characters are your same opinions and they don’t understand the value of fiction-ality. I respect the value of fiction-ality, as do you, as do most artists. What did Emily Dickinson say? Let’s all repeat. “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” She didn’t mean tell the truth slant when you have to swear by your bible and all that, she meant that people can’t handle the truth and we need a few good men to step up and say things how they really are and also, why do Eye-talian-Americans revere the mafia guys on their restaurant walls so much? Can we get some pics of women on these walls? The women cooking your sauces and scrubbing your baby’s behinds and smacking dudes upside the head when they say stupid things? I want some women on the wall of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria because ain’t no brother—white or black—comes onto this planet without traveling through a woman’s body.
Mm-hmm.
Now, people get all worked up about “right and wrong” when they lack emotional intelligence, and when they haven’t read The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity by Cynthia Bourgeault. I’ll admit it, Mook, I haven’t read it either. I read some of it and I heard some theories. It’s like reading quantum physics with mysticism thrown in. But this underlying point of hers, I get, which is that we have this problem in our society and our world of “two sides” to every story. The trinity, Bourgeault supposes, suggests there is a “third man” (not to be confused with The Third Man film directed by Carol Reed in 1949), and that there is actually, additionally, a fourth force as well, helping us make decisions and operate in this sometimes terrifyingly sordid world. This is a lot like the four elements in shamanic philosophy, I think, and also, if you open this book, your mind is gonna spin so I don’t know that you should open this book—I just want you to know what’s out there and some options for you to undertake if you want to figure out why you threw a trashcan into the window of the nice man’s pizza parlor. If you’re sitting up at night thinking about it. If you’re considering why you would hurt the hand that feeds you and all that.
Truthfully, Mook, your actions and your movie makes a lot more sense to me now in 2025, after the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Philadelphia in 2020, and I’m a mother and I have seen how things just haven’t radically changed or improved in what—30+ years—from the time you made your movie. And as an educator, I am often considering these questions. We see that all the information and education in the world doesn’t change hearts of people, right? It is still our hearts that need the work, Mook. And we like to take out our aggression on the safe people in our lives, hmm? Don’t we? The people who stood up for us, the people who helped us. We need a place to put our anger, so we give it to them. When we’re honest. And until we think and behave differently. Until we’re more grateful.
We’re all just mad, Mookie. And the thing I noticed about Sal and people in the neighborhood the next day after a black man was killed by police, was this conversation about the destruction of property, but property can be restored and bought again. The black man who was killed can’t come back to life. And that’s the thing we really ought to be focusing on. Bringing the black man back to life. Looking at the injustices that keep happening, and why certain boundaries can get crossed again and again, and other boundaries cannot get crossed. Who is running this ship?
Money can buy pizza and property, but it can’t buy a soul, can it? So what does it take to get more souls vibrating on this planet in harmony, Mookie? What’s going to fill people with spark that ain’t aggression and anger? Filled with the fire of the holy spirit and life?
I tell you, life is really scary to some folks. Life is scarier than violence, because they see violence every day, but only rarely do they see joy in life and in living.
Anyway, I don’t know what’s the right thing here. Writing to you this way? Saying this, saying that? I just know that people who are obsessed with being right are people you want to stay away from. They think they know everything.
The people I trust the most are the people who listen and consider, and try a new way. I also trust the people who just stand back and cry.
A lot of us would do well to just cry.
Namaste,
Ms. Wonderful
Unique: c. 1600, "single, solitary," from French unique (16c.), from Latin unicus "only, single, sole, alone of its kind," from unus "one" (from PIE root *oi-no- "one, unique").
from Etymology Online / unicorn