For my first paragraph after watching the Do the right thing by Spike Lee and reading the Between the world and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I will come up with the common themes between each. Both shows the extreme danger that racial, civil, and generational misunderstandings and prejudices can bring, and it is a work that reveals that violence is the last choice that can be seen especially from the oppressed side. The unfairness, starting from discrimination to rioting and looting, a frustrating cycle that cannot resolve in reality, is not solved in the film and also book. And, it shows racial awareness in America and the current status of black people. For example, Mookie, the main character of this film, working at Harlem and Italian pizza parlors in New York, had to earn money for his girlfriend and baby. In the struggle of the Italian and black people that happened unexpectedly, the silent Mookie’s anger explodes, and the pizza shop becomes a mess and fires. The firemen shot the stream to the black people, not the burning store, and they did not investigate the facts of the incident, but the black people were beaten, and the police took them away. By the violence of the police, Radio Raheem is dying of love and hatred.

     For my second paragraph, I want to use a quote to support the writer and the director trying to say and how racism affects African American. For the first quote, I will use the quote from the movie Do the right thing. The director Spike Lee, who spoke persistently about the roots of racial conflict and genuine reconciliation use a quote of Dr, Martin Luther King.

“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 a 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.” (Do the right thing) For the second quote, I will use some sentences from the between the world and me.

“But the race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible— this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.” (Coates, Between the World and Me, p7)

      For my third paragraph, I will be writing my experience or thoughts on a common topic. And I want to write about some similar experiences as in the book or movie, and how to overcome prejudice in society.

     Rather than giving solutions, it concludes a film that is neither more nor less than the reality we are in. What I needed most in both movie and book is understanding, reconciliation, and love, not hatred. Unlike expectation, it shows bitter until the end, but it does not seem to be easily solved. Both book and movie show American contradictory liberal democracy.