How I Got Radicalized
When Network TV Censored ‘Do the Right Thing’
As a child, I knew Radio Raheem died but not how. Only later did I realize a trash can through a window was a reasonable response.
Welcome to How I Got Radicalized, a new series at GEN that tells a story about a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.
I was 10 or 11 when I first watched Do the Right Thing, decidedly too young to sit through Spike Lee’s 1989 film peppered with scenes and language that my elders would have likely deemed too “colorful.” I was sitting in the living room of my home in Columbus, watching network television, a censored format that provided a buffer against the film’s more salacious moments — scenes that I wouldn’t see until a few years later, when I watched the movie again on DVD in a friend’s basement.
The issue with movies on network television in the ’90s was that the standards by which something was deemed too inappropriate for broadcast appeared to exist on a sliding scale. Whereas images of a Black man’s death was edited out in Do the Right Thing, the network that showed Alien was fine keeping the scene where an alien exploded out of a man’s chest.
In the broadcast television showing of Do the Right Thing, viewers did not see the character Radio Raheem die. There was a quick shot of the police confronting him and maybe a short view of him lying lifeless on the ground, but then the film cut to commercial. When it returned, the block was already in the midst of upheaval. Mookie, the film’s protagonist, calmly surveyed the chaos before emptying out a trash can and throwing it through the window of his job at Sal’s pizzeria — the centerpiece of the movie’s tensions.
When viewed on network television, it appeared to me then that the rage of the film’s Black people had bubbled over with no instigation. To witness Radio Raheem die on the screen years later was jarring. Radio Raheem was, to me, one of the more lovable characters in the film. I knew older heads who carried large boomboxes to and through the parks and thought of themselves as philosophers of sorts. There were versions of Radio Raheem in my own orbit that made him the most touchable…
