According to W.J.T Mitchell in his article titled “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,”

The film elicited disapproval from critics and viewers as well. It was denounced as an incitement to violence and even as an act of violence by viewers who regarded its representations of ghetto characters as demeaning (Mitchell 891).

In the footnote of the same article, Mitchell notes that Lee was accused of being “ignorant of African-American history and guilty of low opinion of his own people” in Murray Kempton's review (891). However, not all critics were as harsh as Kempton's. Spike Lee himself took on a defensive position about the misconceptions surrounding the motivations behind producing the film.

In Philip Hanson's article titled “The Politics of Inner City Identity in Do the Right Thing,” Lee states that the film “will be told from a Black point of view . . . to express the views of the Black people who otherwise don't have access to power and media” (Hanson 54). In the film, Lee is able to give the black people access to power by portraying Radio Raheem's character as a sort of icon against the dominating white establishment in the neighborhood. Through the most increasingly popular commercial musical form of black rap, Radio Raheem carries around his gigantic boom box playing Public Enemy's “Fight the Power.”

In Victoria E. Johnson's “Polyphony and Cultural Expressions: Interpreting Musical Traditions in Do the Right Thing,” “music is used to orient and hook the spectator, from assisting in emphasizing visual cues to monitoring or manipulating physiological reactions to the film” (Johnson 18). Lee uses the aural tool of rap music to enhance the visual aspects of the film. In one scene, before Radio Raheem's physical features are introduced to the viewer, his giant boom box is exaggerated by the close-up camera effect. The camera then travels upwards to reveal his massive frame (Johnson 24). The entire character of Radio Raheem, including his ghetto stereo system, serves as a public manifestation that fights against the dominating power figures in the community. The music that he plays over and over again is a way of the “young black males to talk back to the establishment” (24). In the film, the police act as the controlling and over-powering image.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, black rap tended to comment negatively on police behavior in black neighborhoods. The song that Radio Raheem constantly plays relays the “unwelcome, social criticism from young, urban, black, male perspective” (28).

While the black man's sweatin'
In the rhythm I'm rollin'
Got to give us what we want
Got to give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is the freedom of death
We got to fight the powers that be
To revolutionize make a change
What we need is awareness
Power to the people, no delay

What the lyrics do here is it gives Radio Raheem a voice to express the general feeling of the black community towards racial injustice. The emphasis on the word “fight” as echoes in the title of the song, in a sense echoes the feeling of need to retaliate against the white regime in society. However, not all black characters in the film agree to boycott Sal's pizzeria for not hanging up “brothers” on the Wall of Fame. Not all black characters are willing to take violent measures to solve the problem of racial injustice that persists in every black community. Mookie's sister, Jade, refuses to participate in the boycott planned by Radio Raheem and Buggin' Out; instead, she opts to contribute something good to the community. Even though she may be aware of the racial tensions that exist, like many others in the community, she chooses to ignore and put them behind.

Mitchell specifies the “Wall of Fame” to be the center of violence in the film. It is the point from which violence bursts out of its shell in a heated racial argument. The Italian-American owner, Sal, refuses to hang up any pictures of black people on the wall when Buggin' Out creates commotion, “How come there are no brothers up on the wall?” The wall is an important symbol that serves as the driving point from which violence emerges. One of the first scenes of the movie opens up to a bright sunny day in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. The hardworking lifestyle of some of the black characters are depicted-Mister Senor Love Daddy making a living out of being the host of the neighborhood's radio station, We Love Radio 108 FM, and Mookie making a living out of being the pizza-delivery boy at Sal's pizzeria. Racial tension is in the air, but it is not until Buggin' Out visits the pizzeria one afternoon and realizes that he has a problem with Sal's “Wall of Fame.” The Wall is important to Sal because it not only depicts famous Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Liza Minelli, Mario Cuomo, but it represents these people as being the ones who made it possible for Italians to be recognized as full members in the American public sphere. On the contrary, for Buggin' Out, the Wall signifies the exact opposite, the black people's exclusion from the white public sphere (Mitchell 894).

The film pivots around both Malcom X's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s “violent and nonviolent strategies,”

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. (Martin Luther King Jr.)

I think there are plenty of good people in the America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense. I call it intelligence. (Malcolm X)

Many critics and viewers accused Lee of creating many stereotypical figures of the black race. The film was not only criticized for being an “incitement to violence and even an act of violence,” but it represented its “ghetto characters as demeaning.” What Malcolm X's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches do is they prove that there is no one way of combating violence in a black community. The film may appear to be submerged in the act of violence, but it does not let the audience underestimate the difficulty in pinpointing the correct strategy required to overcome power. If Lee wanted, he could have portrayed all of his black characters as either violent or nonviolent, but he chose to provide a variety of them because, after all, even though the black people are viewed as a close-knit community, there are conflicting views about black violence. We don't see Mother Sister, Da Mayor, or Jade participate in the riot at the end of the film.

Hanson states that Lee's film “represents an entry in a decades long discourse on a specific strain of logic in American civil rights history, one involving the particularly constructed ghetto identity of urban Blacks and the ways in which such identity manifests itself in outburst of violence” (Hanson 47). It is the racial ghettoization that creates the black identity for the oppressed people. Lee believed that it was racism that drove people to the ghettos, kept them there, and conditioned them on a daily basis (50). The black race is associated with images of violence through the media because that is how the dominating class in society wants to portray the black people-brutal and barbaric human beings. The media generally stereotypes various racial identities; therefore, we ought to give Spike Lee credit for not stereotyping his characters in the strictest sense of the word. He balances between the concepts of violence and nonviolence which acts as “strategies within a struggle that is simply an ineradicable fact of American public life” (Mitchell 898-899).

According to Mitchell in his article “Seeing Do the Right Thing,” the concepts of violence and nonviolence “are not presented as racist black-and-white alternatives” (602). Two black men had conflicting views about violence; therefore, their views are manifested throughout Spike Lee's film, where there are black characters that opt for violence, and there are black characters that opt out of violence. Likewise, there are white characters that opt for violence, and there are white characters that opt out of violence. Therefore, instead of merely stereotyping his black and white characters, Lee offers a holistic approach and depiction of his characters in Do the Right Thing.

If the film's center of violence was indeed the “Wall of Fame,” would it be safe to conclude that placing photos of black heroes on the Wall would have killed the violence? In the end, racial tension is an inevitable evil in American society that has died down over the past couple of decades, but has not been entirely eradicated. The point and center of violence erupts from the public image of the “Wall of Fame,” but solving the problem becomes the more difficult issue. What Buggin' Out was really looking for was not just the black photos up on the Wall, but through that act, he demanded a sense of respect from the white. If checking violence would have been so simple, racism would not have been a complicating phenomenon through all these years.

Through the use of the song “Fight the Power,” images and acts of violence are ricocheted throughout the film to paint a picture of the relationship of the black characters to their dominating white opponents. Spike Lee's film does not stereotype its black characters simply as violent public figures using music as a starting point of retaliating against the power groups; rather, it is a film that see-saws between the dialogues of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. to portray a variety of black figures in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.