Do the Right Thing

The Ballot or the Bullet?
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"Do the Right Thing"-- the colloquial definition might feel easy to say, and people say it all the time: "you should do the right thing and just..."

The film asks: but what is the "right thing"? And how do we "do" "it"? Is there an objective, universal, capital T True "right thing"? If so, how do we get to it?

It's one of those phrases I think we implicitly assume a definition for, but the film unsettles it so deeply that it loses stable meaning and reveals that the "right thing" is socially constructed and historically contingent. And it's really hard to turn back around and escape that fact once you fully and completely sit with it. It's like you've been looking through a glass windowpane your whole life but Spike Lee shatters it and only then do you know you've been looking through glass the entire time.
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There's lots to write about urban unrest, slavery's afterlives and permutations, the carceral apparatus, and racial difference, that I'm also sure many people have written about.

Slavery under a different name, its vestiges hidden under a new garb, behind the facade of prison phone fees, predictive policing technologies, predatory debt structures, and dating app algorithms.