Bostan 1 Erdem Bostan Burcu Alkan Ethnic Literature 21 April 2014 Ethnicity and Doing the Right Thing

Ethnicity is a way of categorizing people based on their shared race, cultural heritage, history, language, homeland, religion etc. but the word is usually used in order to refer to a group of people that share a common race. While classification is good when analyzing a certain social group, this classification brings a problem with it: the problem of people having an ethnocentric viewpoint. An ethnocentric viewpoint is, as the name implies, a viewpoint based on ethnicity, taking ethnicity as its center, and what makes it a problematic thing is how it makes people perceive the world as divided into two, as us and them. The problems ethnocentric viewpoint entails are quite obvious in almost every scene of the movie Do the Right Thing directed by Spike Lee, and it brings nothing but destruction in the end. Ethnicity, or to put it right, having an ethnocentric viewpoint, whether it is based on common race, language, religion or homeland, brings discrimination as we clearly see in the movie Do the Right Thing. It is not just a matter of being black or white. Eventhough blacks are considered to be the victim of the most cruel racial oppression in America, we can see in the movie that the oppressed might very well be the oppressor when he has enough power. As America is the melting pot, it is a perfect setting for a movie about ethnicity. Those who have not melted in the pot properly have ethnocentric viewpoints when they come across to a person who belongs to another ethnicity. There are African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans etc. and the movie shows us that eventhough it seems like a peaceful neighborhood, there is a constant struggle between them with

Bostan 2 underlying racist thoughts. This struggle is represented in a scene where the character named Radio Raheem and the Puerto Ricans try to listen to their own music: Radio Raheem tries to listen to rap, while the Puerto Ricans try to listen to salsa music, and they constantly turn the volume up to drown the other music out, the music being the symbol of all these different ethnicities. The three old black guys watch the Korean man from a distance and they swear, questioning how a Korean man can have a good business in our neighborhood so quickly while they sit there all day. In his essay titled The Fact of Blackness, Frantz Fanon says: It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you. but what we see in the movie Do the Right Thing is that the real situation is often the exact opposite of that idea. One of the most important scenes in the movie is the scene where the members of all these different ethnicities swear at each other, call names and use racial slurs based on every stereotype you can ever think of to humiliate each other, and this is another a clear example of this racism that is present even between all these racially oppressed people. The end of the movie titled Do the Right Thing shows us how racism can bring destruction even in just one day. The thing that started it all was the pointless struggle of the character called Buggin Out to make the owner of the pizza place to hang pictures of important black people on the wall next to all the Italian-American people. At first, no one took him seriously, but with Radio Raheems support, heat went up, like the actual heat that was already up throughout the movie. The problem with ethnocentric viewpoint is that it always comes with an underlying racism, nationalism and other isms. These bring discrimination, oppression and they make people define themselves not just as humans but through creating an other based on race, nation, or ethnicity. It makes people be proud of things that they did not earn themselves, but

Bostan 3 of things they had when they were born, and this is utterly irrational. People dont like the other. Unfortunately, this is the case even with oppressed people, and minorities. Do the Right Thing is an excellent example of this condition and in my opinion, it is not a coincidence that the character that is depicted as the most foolish is the one who got everything started with his pointless struggle.