Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) is one of the most celebrated examples of the ‘new black film wave’. In its depiction of the simmering racial tension in a Brooklyn neighbourhood, the movie takes in hip-hop fashions, rap music, police brutality, gentrification, immigration, deindustrialisation and joblessness. I
n his foreword to this new edition, Ed Guerrero looks back on the movie in the context of Spike Lee's filmmaking career and contemporary tensions between the police and the African-American community.
