In his critically acclaimed film “Do the Right Thing,” director Spike Lee captured how fragile racial tensions between different Brooklyn communities resulted in misdirected actions against people ultimately not responsible for the institutional barriers placed on African-American communities. Much like how the film depicted Korean Americans as “scapegoats” as Lee puts it, the director urged the Church Avenue boycotters to stop venting their anger towards the Korean grocers of the Red Apple shop.
Lee explains his thoughts on the boycott in this Korea Times English edition article by Sophia Kyung Kim.
Spike Lee: Brooklyn grocers doing the right thing
By: Kim, Sophia Kyung (August 15, 1990)
Brooklyn New York
African Americans who resent Koreans setting up stores in their neighborhoods are doing the wrong thing by venting their anger at them, says director Spike Lee.
“Anything they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten because they’ve worked hard,” he says. “It’s amazing to me that Koreans in the course of three years own every fruit and vegetable stand in New York. I say more power to them.”
A Brooklyn native, Lee has become a sort of a spokesman on racism and race relations since the release of his controversial and critically acclaimed 1989 film, “Do the Right Thing.”
The comedy-drama explores fragile race relations between an Italian American pizzeria owner and his African American customers on a hot summer day in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The film also depicts a Korean husband and wife who run a produce store, and touches on their sometimes-tense relationship with their customers.
Lee’s views on Korean American merchants oppose those of the boycotters, who say Koreans are economically exploiting their people.
Through hard work and with family unity. New York City’s Korean American greengrocers are providing a “perfect example” of what African Americans should be doing, the 33-year-old Lee says. But African Americans today don’t have “a family structure (that) is still strong and intact” as Korean Americans do, Lee says.
In addition, American banks discriminate against African Americans who apply for business loans, he maintains.
Lee calls African Americans’ anger toward Korean American merchants “misguided energy.” The anger is “unjustified because (Koreans) are not harming anybody.”
Instead of becoming angry, African Americans should “take it out on themselves and do what they can” to advance economically, he believes.
While there is no doubt that African Americans are victims of racism. Lee continues, “There comes a point where you have to go on, knowing that you have to work 10 times harder to do what you want to.”
And that’s what Koreans have managed to do, according to Lee.
Black anger, festers when they see “foreigners” like Korean immigrants owning businesses all over New York City in a short period of time, Lee points out. “Instead of blaming themselves, their inability to build black businesses and be entrepreneurs, they are going to blame the Koreans.”
Asked about some African Americans’ demands that Koreans put some of their profits back into the community by giving jobs and donating to neighborhood causes, Lee comments, “That sounds like extortion to me … they should be ashamed.”
He also questioned whether people making those demands are “self-appointed black leaders or real black leaders.”
In “Do the Right Thing,” Lee says he tried to portray Korean Americans as “a people in a strange land trying to do the best they can. They are human like everyone else. English is their second language.”
Lee’s views on Korean-African American tension are reflected in a few of the film’s key scenes.
In one, three unemployed street philosophers comment about the Korean greengrocers across the street. One complains about how those Koreans, who haven’t been in the country for more than year, are already running a good business in their neighborhood.
Sweet Dick Willy reacts negatively to his friend’s bantering. “I’m tired of hearing that excuse. You ain’t gonna do a damn thing. You are going to sit your money ass on this corner. Where are you going to get your business?…That’s what I thought. I am going to go over there and give them Koreans more of my money…. You’ve got a lot of damn nerve, too. You got off the boat, too.”
Sweet Dick Willy saunters to the store and asks for beer. The Korean owner warily replies’, “No more free beer.”
“In that scene, blacks are using Koreans as scapegoats,” explains Lee.
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