Held to answer

Twenty-five years after Spike Lee burned down Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, his people are still trying to do the right thing. Some of them don’t have a clue.

Take LaRue Bell, a black senior at Cajon High School in San Bernardino, Calif.

Earlier this month he said that when he arrived in math class, he asked his teacher, Bernadette Yuson, why she was rearranging the student seating. According to Bell, she replied, “Because I want to move all the niggas.”

Look at the photo of Ms. Yuson, and tell me that out of nowhere she tossed off the word “niggas.” Not only is Bell probably not good at math, he isn’t good at lying. But at age 17, if he has learned nothing else, he has learned how to use the N-word to beat non-blacks into submission.

After Bell whipped up the usual race-based frenzy among the media and various black organizations, Ms. Yuson was placed on leave. School administrators quickly rushed to apologize, and Bell’s mother demanded the teacher be fired.

Here’s what the teacher said happened:

“Before the bell rang, a male student of mine dragged my chair away from my table and sat on it. When the bell rang at 1:45 p.m., I requested him to return my chair, but he argued disrespectfully before finally returning it. When I took attendance of the class, he kept on mumbling … words I couldn’t hear nor understand from where I was standing. As I was taking the roll and explaining their task for the day, the student stood up and shouted to his classmate across the room the word ‘nigga.’

“I was distracted and disturbed (by) what he said, so, I questioned him and asked, ‘Wow! Nigga? Is that a good word?’”

The other students in the class agreed that Ms. Yuson repeated the word back at Bell to confirm what he had said to another student.

Twenty-five years after Spike Lee made his critically acclaimed tour de force on race relations, “Do the Right Thing,” the big victory isn’t electing a black president. It’s the sanctity of the N-word and stories like LaRue Bell.

Here in Portland, Ore., four black employees at a Daimler Trucks North America assembly plant, recently filed state civil-rights complaints claiming their coworkers have called them “nigger” and “boy” and “Toby.” (How many whites even understand the Toby reference?)

The N-word is an easy charge to make if you’re black and hoping to score a settlement or settle a score. So why would white racists want to play into the hands of black racists, who need racial slurs to justify their own hatred.

The eye-opener for me was years ago (about the time Spike Lee was first making a name for himself) when a black school janitor in Fontana, Calif. – near San Bernardino – claimed somebody had placed a noose in his locker. After much sympathetic coverage at the newspaper where I worked, it turned out he had placed the noose himself.

Spike Lee understood that it wasn’t just white people who held bigoted thoughts. In “Do the Right Thing,” there’s a montage where characters of different races and ethnicities stare into the camera and let loose their own innermost vitriol.

Here’s Mookie, Lee’s black character, talking about Italians (his boss owns Sal’s Famous Pizzeria): “Dago, wop, garlic-breath, guinea, pizza-slinging, spaghetti-bending, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsinging motherfucker.”

Here’s the boss’s son, Pino, talking about blacks: “You gold-teeth, gold-chain-wearing, fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin’, monkey, ape, baboon, big-thigh, fast-running, three-hundred-sixty-degree-basketball-dunking spade Moulan Yan… .”

Here’s one of the Puerto Rican men, who hang out on a stoop in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, talking about Koreans: “You slant-eyed, me-no-speak-American, own every fruit and vegetable stand in New York. Reverend Moon, Summer Olympics ’88, Korean kick-boxing bastard.”

Lee has a police officer unleashing on “goya-bean-eating, fifteen-in-a-car, thirty-in-an-apartment” Puerto Ricans. He has a Korean store clerk groveling to Jewish customers, “It’s cheap. I got a good price for you… .”

When the movie first came out, I saw it twice, once in a large theater in L.A. with a predominantly black audience and again in a theater in San Bernardino, filled with blacks, Hispanics and whites. Both times the audience laughed wildly during the montage.

This week I saw it again in Portland, part of a new series on race – “Movies In Black And White” – being presented at the Hollywood Theater. What did a largely white audience, in a city proud of its progressive politics, do during the bigot montage?

They offered studious, polite laughter, although I heard a singular guffaw when one of the Koreans made a crack about chocolate-egg-cream-drinking Jews.

After the movie, there was a discussion organized by Jason Lamb,  who introduced writer and filmmaker David Walker and comedian Sean Jordan  to talk about the movie and take questions from the audience. (Lamb and Walker are black; Jordan is white.)

Walker, who used to be film editor for Willamette Week, said he saw “Do the Right Thing” the day it opened in Portland. He remembered coming out of the theater and hearing the arguments. On one side, people couldn’t believe that Lee’s character, Mookie, threw a garbage can through Sal’s window, which led to a riot and the restaurant being burned down. On the other side, people couldn’t believe that a black character named Radio Raheem died from a police chokehold.

“Nobody does the right thing at any time in the movie…,” Walker said. “People asked, ‘What’s the right thing?’ Because nobody did it. … We’re scared to talk civilly about things that scare us the most.”

The talk inside Hollywood Theater was very civil. When the subject is race, white people are generally afraid of saying the wrong thing so they don’t say much of anything unless they’re sure it’s safe.

What struck me about the film 25 years later was how unsparing Lee was towards his black characters. Most of them are not very sympathetic, including the character he plays.

Mookie delivers pizzas for Sal’s, but he’s a shirker. He ties up the restaurant phone, and customers can’t call in orders. Midway in his shift, he visits his Puerto Rican girlfriend (and the mother of his son, whom he shows no interest in). He takes a shower and runs ice cubes over her naked body. Throughout his spotty workday, he nags Sal to pay him early.

At one point in the movie, black youths open a fire hydrant and blast a white guy’s classic convertible. A little later, one of the black characters, Buggin’ Out, gets riled up when a white man steps on his Air Jordans. The damage is less serious than what was done to the convertible, which was laughed off.

And the character Radio Raheem struts through the neighborhood blasting Public Enemy on his boombox. He stops in front of some Puerto Ricans, who are playing their own music and cranks his boombox louder, drowning them out, letting them know who’s got the biggest sound in the neighborhood.

Later he tries the same stunt in Sal’s Pizzeria. Sal tells him he doesn’t want loud music in his business. Ultimately, Radio Raheem dies fighting for the right to blast everyone with his boombox. No, he didn’t deserve to die, but had the police not intervened, Radio Raheem might have choked Sal to death, who would not have deserved to die, either. What if Radio Raheem had just turned down his radio?

Spike Lee was never a ghetto black. He was raised middle-class. He didn’t get where he is by behaving like Mookie. His work ethic has more in common with Sal. In his screenplay, I can almost hear Lee yelling in frustration – and pity – to poor blacks: “Stop acting like fools!”

There is no tidy takeaway from the movie. In one scene, “Tawana Told the Truth” is shown scrawled on a brick wall.

Did Lee really think Tawana Brawley was telling the truth when the teenager said a group of white men – including a prosecutor – raped her? Or was he showing the solidarity of the black community even in the face of a hoax?

Brawley falsely accused the men of abducting, raping and sodomizing her, then leaving her in a garbage bag. The words “KKK,” “nigger,” and “bitch” were written on her torso, and she was smeared with feces.

A young Al Sharpton rode this racial outrage to national prominence. However, it turned out the epithets written on Brawley’s body were upside down; she had written them herself. The feces on her body were identified as a dog’s. And some of her schoolmates saw her at a party during the time she was supposed to have been abducted.

The lies finally unraveled. Brawley cooked up the story because she was afraid her stepfather, a man who had gone to prison for killing his first wife, would beat her for staying out all night. She and Sharpton were convicted of slander.

“It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims,” state Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman wrote at the time.

The graffiti in Lee’s movie is wrong but carries this truth: People will believe whatever they want regardless of the facts, especially when race is involved.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Doing the Wrong Thing