In 2024, Spike Lee celebrated the 35th anniversary of Do the Right Thing (hereinafter Do Right). That’s because it became an instant “classic” upon its release in 1989. Before its release, it was stereotyped by Hollywood’s producers as a guaranteed “race riot”—that never happened. In theaters, it administered a now-classical racial Rorschach to the American psyche via the sonic aggression of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Buggin Out’s battle-royale against Sal’s “Wall of Fame,” a multicultural “RACIAL SLUR MONTAGE,” and, indeed, a full-blown “race riot”—contained on-screen. Afterwards, Do Right was validated via Lee’s interview with Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and soon featured in the Film Art: An Introduction textbook as a “social problem” film that demonstrated “classical film narrative” technique. Recently, it’s been referenced by news anchors who use Lee’s title as an emphatic moral injunction in/for these times.

Naturally, setting all this in motion was Lee’s act of sitting down in March 1988, with a seed of an idea, and writing. The result was “Do the Right Thing,” which earned Lee an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Boldly provocative, the screenplay and film generated a world-wide body of writing that quotes Lee’s original screenplay: film reviews, newspaper/magazine features, interviews, monographs, essay collections, peer-reviewed articles for film/literature/popular culture, textbooks, conference papers, etc. However, this homage often does the wrong thing because—unbeknownst to writers—they have published an unknowable sum of errors and misinterpretations, now 36 years’ worth, and counting...

How? Because Lee’s writer-director brilliance—Do Right’s layers of discourse, with fast-paced action, the archetypal racial conflict, and trickster-like multilingual repartee—combined with actor improvisations to produce a sum much greater than the parts viewers perceived. Unheard is “Stopped-Up Ears!” for example, an echo-chorus voiced by a female performer that parallels the “Fight the Power!” chorus. Until now no one has heard it and, thus, knew to ask this major question: who has “stopped-up ears?” Many critics quote[d] Lee’s screenplay, verbatim, to comment upon Mr. Señor Love Daddy’s opening poetic rhyme—or rather misquote[d] him since a careful close-listening reveals slight but critical discrepancies.

The full scope of Do Right is reflected in a reading-script, a comprehensive, artful representation of the film’s English and non-English dialogue (Italian, Korean, and Spanish), song lyrics, and hidden voices and acts. The many revelations in the reading-script will not only foster a second generation of intriguing Do Right scholarship, but also reveal how literary Lee’s film is.

True to the “trickster” aesthetic Lee identified with his protagonist (Mookie), Do Right epitomizes the interracial and socioeconomic crossroads that meet in NYC and L.A. An African-American film, its cultural crossroads make it richly Italian-, Korean-, and Puerto-Rican-American. The reading-script stages “multiple consciousness,” the still-pressing circum-Atlantic awareness Togolese scholar Komla M. Avono, in Reading Multiple Consciousness: Exploring the Complexity of Postmodern Identity (2025), invokes to resist “otherization.” Hence this proposal to bring together contributors—speaking to Do Right’s rich multiple consciousness—who will comprise the first-ever conference panel on the classical film that everyone knows and does not know.

Gregory Rutledge (presider), an African Americanist, will open with “Lee’s Do the Right Thing: The Reading-Script,” a brief introduction to the reading-script project and its literary significance. Against the backdrop of the L.A./Rodney King Riots and black-versus-Korean conflicts, Daniel Kim, in “‘What am I Watching?’: Teaching Do the Right Thing in 1992,” reflects on being a UC-Berkely graduate student then and how the film’s brilliance was complicated by the unease it created because of black-Korean tensions. Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings” and the reading-script will help him explore Asian Americans’ reactions. In “Between Black and White: Hearing Korean Voices in Do the Right Thing,” Jang-Wook Huh will draw upon South Korean media’s negative criticism of Do Right, Bong Joon-ho’s recent praise for Lee’s social-justice engagement, and 1990s black-Korean relations, to comment on the reading-script’s Korean-language content. He will articulate the “complex third space” of Koreanness in Do Right. Offering a multi-ethnic, Italian-focused perspective is Maria Lauret’s “‘What Are You Gonna Do?’ - Contextualising Do the Right Thing as Activist Art for the Present.” In the aftermath of #BlackLivesMatter, Lauret centers Sal’s Italianness and Lee’s choice of deleting the original scene—where Sal asks, “What are you gonna do?”—and substituting one in which an anonymous—community?!—speaker directs the question to Sal. Thus, Lauret shows how the reading-script, which activates the community’s multi-ethnic voice, directs “What are you going to do?” to viewers, too.

The formal introduction (7 minutes) and three presentations (45 minutes) will allow for robust questions/discussion afterwards from scholars and Lee fans alike.