For better or worse, the reputation of cinema trailblazer Spike Lee has been inextricably linked to Black stories and to Blackness. Black identity is a theme in nearly every Spike Lee film in some way or another, but the critical and popular conception of his work seems to only care about that particular aspect. However, the issues he’s interested in aren’t limited to Blackness, as Blackness does not exist in a cultural vacuum. From almost the very beginning, Lee has also interrogated the intersections of other racial and ethnic minorities and the nuances of their experiences, including different forms of discrimination. In his third and perhaps most well-regarded film, Do the Right Thing (1989), Lee interrogates prejudices of all kinds in an iconic scene. Various characters of different racial backgrounds spout racial epithets in direct addresses to the camera, culminating in Samuel L. Jackson’s Greek chorus-esque radio DJ character, Mr. Señor Love Daddy, yelling, “Yo! Hold up! Time out! Time out! Y’all take a chill. Ya need to cool that shit out.” In this scene, Lee centers on the all-encompassing nature of hate and calls for calm and understanding. Later in his career, in a pivotal scene in what many consider to be Spike Lee’s magnum opus, Malcolm X (1992), the ideals of togetherness are epitomized by the quote, “People of all colors and races believing in one God, one humanity.” Denzel Washington as Malcolm X has a revelation of the interconnectedness of racial struggle against oppression just as Lee himself has had in some ways.
Despite what were likely good intentions, the representation of non-Black minorities in Spike Lee’s films has not always been flawless. The depiction of Jewish people in Mo’ Better Blues (1990) is often pointed out as a harmful stereotype. John and Nicholas Turturo play brothers Moe and Josh Flatbush, the Jewish owners of the nightclub at which Denzel Washington’s character, Bleek, plays the trumpet. In their portrayal, the Turturo brothers exhibit an exaggerated Jewish New Yorker accent, and they throw in the occasional Yiddish phrase. In one scene, we see them going over accounts on a computer and exclaiming how much they “like numbers” because “numbers never lie.” In other scenes they are constantly money-hungry, always trying to exploit Bleek and the other musicians. Despite the backlash to this regressive depiction, Lee has held firm in his own defense, citing a history of Jewish people in the music industry exploiting Black people.
This is the sort of sentiment present in some of Lee’s earlier work. Rather than including other minorities in order to call attention to their struggles, which are inextricably linked to those of Black people, Lee more often will include a minority character in order to minimize their struggle as compared to Black people. In Get on the Bus (1996), Harry Lennix’s character, Randall – a Black man – and Richard Belzer’s character, Rick – a Jewish man – get into an argument wherein the suffering and participation in the civil rights movement of Jewish people is compared to that of Black people. After Rick mentions that 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust, Randall retorts that over 60 million Black people died in the slave trade. While this scene does serve one progressive purpose–calling out ostensibly liberal non-Black people who hold racial prejudices underneath their performative politics–overall, it comes across as a form of unproductive oppression Olympics. In Girl 6 (1996), Ranjit Chowdhry plays an Indian owner of a convenience store–already a stereotype–who harasses Theresa Randle’s character, Judy. The unnamed convenience store owner essentially only exists as a punchline, with the only possibly meaningful reason for his presence being to emphasize the fetishization of Black women by non-Black men. While that is a phenomenon worth pointing out, this is another example similar to the Jewish characters in Mo’ Better Blues, where Lee points out another group’s perceived transgressions against Black people without any attempts to understand their own history of oppression.
Just as we see Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X have a revelatory experience that leads him to appreciate the interconnectedness of all people, the films of Spike Lee present a similar arc, with Lee shifting from including other minorities only to downplay their experience towards a more productive goal of pluralism and cooperation. Do the Right Thing presents a complication in a linear trend in Lee’s work, as it actually refutes the kind of comparison of oppression in some of his other films from around this time in his career. In addition to the scene with characters of various backgrounds addressing the camera with hate speech, there is an arc of solidarity between Black people and Puerto Rican people, as well as between Black people and Korean people. Early on in the film, there is a scene where Puerto Rican men hanging out on the street are playing Latin music when Bill Nunn’s character, Radio Raheem, walks by loudly blaring Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. There is a bit of a showdown, where the two groups one-up each other by pumping up the volume in a demonstration of territoriality. Later on in the film, when Radio Raheem is murdered by the police, one of the Puerto Rican men remarks sullenly, “They did it again, just like Michael Stewart [a Black man killed by New York police in 1983]”- a moment of respect even after the conflict that occurred earlier and representative of the necessity for collaboration between minorities.
The Korean grocer in the film has a similar arc. Steve Park plays Sonny, the Korean owner of a grocery store on the corner of the block. Paul Benjamin’s character, ML, takes issue with Sonny’s presence in the neighborhood, complaining that the store should be Black-owned. After the death of Radio Raheem at the hands of the police, Mookie (played by Spike Lee himself) throws a trash can into the window of Sal’s pizzeria, starting a riot. Eventually, the rioters turn across the street towards the Korean-owned grocery store. ML leads the charge to trash the Korean’s place next. Sonny defends himself by swinging a broom and tries to appeal to them by saying “I’m Black” – his way of saying that he also faces discrimination due to his minority status. At first, ML is hesitant but is eventually convinced that “Korea man is OK,” and the two shake hands – a powerful symbol of solidarity among minorities in the face of hateful police violence.
In the 2000’s Lee’s representations of other minorities improves. In 25th Hour (2005) there is a sequence that somewhat mirrors the epithet-filled address to camera in Do the Right Thing, where Edward Norton’s character, Monty, goes on a racist tirade towards nearly every conceivable racial and ethnic minority group. In a public bathroom, Monty sees “FUCK YOU!” graffitied on the mirror. He somewhat jokingly says “fuck you too” to the mirror, but his reflection actually responds with “fuck me? Fuck you. Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it.” He then goes on to say fuck you to a number of different minority groups in voice-over as the film cuts to vignettes of the people he’s describing. He says things like “fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis, bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores stinking up my day, terrorists in fucking training” as the film cuts to close-ups of extras and inserts shots that match his descriptions. No one is free from his vitriol as he moves on to Koreans, Russians, Jewish people, Puerto Ricans, Black people, and more. The sequence ends with Norton repeating, “fuck this whole city and everyone in it,” this time adding “from the roadhouses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue,” going on to list other neighborhoods of New York as a trumpet swells in Terrence Blanchard’s score – the vitriol has now turned to a pluralistic pride in the diversity of New York City, both a re-affirmation of the spirit of the city in the wake of the September 11th attacks and a denial of the hatred that divides us.
Continuing through the Bush era, Lee continued to be concerned with the ramifications of the war on terror for people of color. With Inside Man (2006), he explored the discrimination of Middle Eastern and South Asian people in the aftermath of 9/11, particularly by the police and other institutions. The film opens with a remixed version of a Bollywood song, A.R. Rahman’s “Chaiyya Chaiyaa” from the 1998 Shah Rukh Khan film, Dil Se… (directed by Mani Ratnam). The song plays over shots of Manhattan, juxtaposing the South Asian sound with the streets and skyscrapers, suggesting that South Asian culture belongs in New York and in America – at a time when many didn’t agree. Later on in the film, after Clive Owen’s character and his crew take over a bank and hold the customers and workers hostage, they release some of the hostages disguised in the same clothes as the robbers in order to confuse the police. The police open fire with rubber bullets and brutalize the hostages, particularly a Sikh man played by Waris Ahluwalia. They tear off his turban and beat him in the street. When they question him, he complains that he frequently faces discrimination at the hands of American institutions, specifically citing being stopped by airport security, to which Denzel Washington’s character, Detective Frazier, responds, “I bet you can get a cab, though.” While on its surface this would appear to be another instance of Spike resorting to stereotype and refusing a moment of solidarity between two minorities, it actually seems to successfully lighten the mood, as Ahluwalia smiles at the joke. Especially in contrast to Willem Dafoe’s character, a white police officer, denying that his men made abusive remarks, this moment between Washington and Ahluwalia is about finding common ground.
With BlacKkKlansman (2018), Lee shows improvement in the same area he had struggled with nearly 30 years prior: antisemitism. Rather than a harmful stereotype that pits one marginalized group against another, Lee offers a nuanced exploration of the differences between how Black Americans and Jewish Americans face discrimination. Adam Driver’s character is a “passing” Jewish American who is privileged enough to not generally have to be concerned with his Jewishness. Over the course of the film, he has to reckon with his “othered” status in the face of antisemitism, and he begins to relate more to John David Washington’s character and his “crusade” against the KKK. While this could initially be seen as just another form of the “we’ve had it worse” mentality, it actually successfully threads the needle of discussing the practical differences in the experiences of the two groups while respecting that both have faced discrimination, creating a sense of kinship between their struggles – and a welcome departure from the stereotypes in Mo’ Better Blues.
In Da 5 Bloods (2020), Lee once again explicitly refutes the kind of competition of oppression he himself had been somewhat guilty of in the past. In one exchange, the Vietnamese tour guide, Vinh (portrayed by Johnny Tri Nguyen), quotes “our uncle,” referring to Ho Chi Minh. When questioned, he explains that Ho Chi Minh was “the father of modern-day Vietnam, like your George Washington.” Clarke Peters’s character, Otis, pushes back, citing that George Washington was a slave owner, to which Vinh replies, “As they say in our colonists’ second language, touché.” This exchange on paper would seem like another instance of one-upmanship designed to demonstrate that the oppression of Black Americans is worse than other groups, but it actually becomes a more nuanced and endearing moment between the two, similar to the Indian cab driver joke in Inside Man. There is mutual respect between Vinh and the Bloods, symbolizing solidarity.
With Da 5 Bloods, Lee also centers the experience of the Vietnamese people as a result of what they call the American War in a way that seeks to correct the canon of white American-centric war films and address the tragic legacy of the conflict and the canonical filmic depictions of it. The film quotes Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), both explicitly and stylistically: in one scene the Bloods go to a nightclub called “Apocalypse Now”, and in another scene Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries plays, emulating its use in Apocalypse Now. These references are not simply homages but situate Da 5 Bloods within the canon of war films, allowing it to comment on some of its shortcomings. The film also addresses the legacy of American film and television surrounding the Vietnam War, calling out the “fugazi Rambo movies” that try to “act like we won the Vietnam War.” In addition to these comments on media about the war, the film also includes discussions of aspects of the war that are overlooked. The colonial history of Vietnam and atrocities committed by the United States, such as the My Lai Massacre, are discussed, as well as the treatment of Black people in the military. Da 5 Bloods is one of Lee’s films that is most dedicated to the interconnectedness of the struggle for racial equality.
As so many Black artists and other artists of color have been myopically held to a standard of representing an entire group, the work of Spike Lee is almost exclusively discussed in the context of Black identity and experience. However, it would be a disservice to the legacy of the great filmmaker to ignore the other elements of his work. From nearly the beginning, Lee’s films have touched on the experiences of other minority groups. 25th Hour and Inside Man were particularly meaningful in the years following the September 11th attacks, when racism against Middle Eastern and South Asian people was at an all-time high. Da 5 Bloods also served as a corrective balm to the troubled legacy of Vietnam War films that ignored the experiences of both Black soldiers and the Vietnamese people. His track record has not always been spotless, but he has shown a tremendous capacity for growth and has created some of the most meaningful works of solidarity among marginalized groups in recent memory.
