Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture

9. Fight the Power: Conflict Theories and Do the Right Thing

138 | 9 Fight the Power Conflict Theories and Do the Right Thing 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 up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. —Martin Luther King 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 Criminologists have long confronted the fact that those who get caught up in the criminal justice system are disproportionately drawn from the lower social classes. Some have examined biological, psychological, and social factors that may help explain this disparity, while others—conflict theorists—go further, questioning the very processes through which crime and criminality are constructed in a class-based society, one where elites define crimes in the first place. Conflict theorists look to social imbalances in power to explain the disproportionate representation of poor and marginal people in the criminal justice system. Conflict theory is rooted in Marxism, but the nineteenth-century political philosopher Karl Marx himself actually said little about crime and criminality. Thus conflict theorists have extracted principles from Marxism and applied them to crime. To illuminate these principles, we turn to a film that at first glance may not seem to be about crime at all: director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). This was one of the first films to deal with the complex tensions that informed race politics in the late twentieth century. Lee’s depiction of Fight the Power | 139 characters who are neither good nor evil but complicated and flawed was groundbreaking, and today the film is considered a cultural touchstone, a movie against which to compare more recent efforts (such as the 2004 movie Crash) that deal with the politics of race. Lee frankly addressed the dilemmas of a multiethnic and multirace community trapped by both capitalism and its own failures, posing the solutions in terms of nonviolence or its alternative , revolution. So what can Do the Right Thing tell us about the causes of crime and about conflict theory? Do the Right Thing 1989 the number another summer. . . . We got to fight the powers that be Lemme hear you say Fight the power. —The hip-hop group Public Enemy on the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing Do the Right Thing begins with a dancer (Rosie Perez), now in a bodysuit, now in boxing clothes, thrusting and punching against a backdrop of Brooklyn brownstone stoops, her motions choreographed to Public Enemy’s rap anthem “Fight the Power.” The song, one of the film’s central motifs, continuously reminds viewers of Do the Right Thing’s political engagement. As the film opens, we hear an alarm clock while a local radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel Jackson), tells his morning listeners to “Wake up!” He begins his daily report by describing how hot it is, with temperatures expected to reach above 100 degrees. In fact, it is going to be the hottest day of the year. And the color of the day, Love Daddy says, is black. Through these few quick reference points, Lee sets the stage symbolically for a revolutionary day, one in which neighborhood tensions will grow heated, escalate, and end violently. Next, we are introduced to Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a character who is mentally and physically disabled. Smiley roams the neighborhood, stuttering in his attempts to sell copies of an image of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, together and smiling. The photo captures a moment of good-natured exchange between men known for their ideological opposition . Smiley informs us that although both are dead, they still call out to us to fight against hatred. Here the film introduces its key question: whether violent or nonviolent means are best in the struggle against oppression and for political empowerment. Next we meet the main character, Mookie (Spike 140 | Fight the Power Lee), who is sitting on a bed counting his weekly pay—an introduction to another key theme, that of capitalism and the poverty of black people. Playful and charming, Mookie teases his sister, Jade (Joie Lee), who is trying to sleep and, annoyed, tells him to “go to work.” Mookie replies with “gotta get paid” and heads to his delivery job at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the...