Klein apparently thought so. In his words, the film has only two messages: "the police are your enemy" and "white people are your enemy." And, like many white critics, he seized on Mookie throwing the trash can as the film's turning point, not the death of Radio Raheem. "It is Spike Lee himself—in the role of Sal's deliveryman—who starts the riot," Klein wrote, proceeding to describe that action, with jaw-dropping hyperbole, as "one of the stupider, more self-destructive acts of violence I've ever witnessed." It should be noted, in contemplating that sentence, that (as Lee points out) Klein's editorial never even mentioned the murder of Radio Raheem, to say nothing of describing it in those terms. In Lee's view—which is hard to argue with, reading a piece like Klein's—many white critics are more concerned with the loss of "white-owned property" than with "another nigger gone."



Of course, as we now know, Lee's canny examination of race relations did not incite riots in America's cities after it was released in the summer of 1989. Those riots came three years later, in spring of 1992—in response to a very different film, of four white officers beating the hell out of a black man, and to the acquittal of those officers by a (mostly white) jury. Lee was not a provocateur; he was a prognosticator. But the notion that was crafted early that summer and disseminated on the pages of Newsweek, New York, and Time, of Spike Lee the bomb-throwing race baiter, not only held, but became common wisdom. A notorious 1992 Esquire cover story announced the widespread perception, then and now, in the plainest language imaginable: "Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass."

Time has proven writers like Kroll and Denby wrong not only in their predictions of the film's impact, but of its quality—it appeared on both the AFI's 1997 Top 100 list and its 2007 revision, was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress, and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It's hard to know if Denby came around on the film, but his mixed Red Hook review is conspicuously absent of mentions to Do the Right Thing, its obvious point of reference (though he does go out of his way to praise Lee's "courage" and his "magnificent" documentary When the Levees Broke).

Of course, when it comes to his statements to the press, Lee is often his own worst enemy. He has, over the years, said some unfortunate things: that kids should skip school to go see Malcolm X, that he can't make an anti-Semitic film because Jewish people run Hollywood ("and that's a fact"), that it's "not too far-fetched" that the New Orleans levees were deliberately destroyed. His 25th Hour star Edward Norton admits, "I don't think Spike is his own best advocate. I've told him that. 'You should let me talk about your movies, because I talk about them much better than you do.' He comes off as much more angry. People associate Spike sometimes with an angry righteousness and urgency that I don't think his films have. I don't think his films are angry at all. They are very compassionate." But the tone and tenor of his comments are also frequently misinterpreted and misconstrued. Of the Do The Right Thing era, frequent collaborator John Turturo said, "I think a lot of stuff written about Spike's movies in those days was from all these white writers, writing about a culture that they didn't grow up in... I think a lot of journalists are white and they want to put an angle on the story. And it gave them a story to write about."