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Forming a Critical Sense of Race With Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing"

Kelli Marshall JSTOR Daily
Each term my film students watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works. Most students of color feel Lee’s character did the right thing while the majority of white students cannot understand why Mookie would do such a thing to his boss. Why this reaction—term after term, year after year?

The Lost Counterculture

Stephen Maher Jacobin
Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.
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