Play (Loudly): The Racialized Erotics of Blacksound in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

Abstract:In her essay “Counter-Hegemonic Art: Do the Right Thing,” feminist cultural critic bell hooks writes that most viewers do not see Radio Raheem’s death in Do the Right Thing (1989) as a brutal murder, nor do critics mention it, and that the film portrays Black men’s oppression as solely racial—unrelated to gender or class. I take up her call in this essay, written on the film’s thirtieth anniversary. I also argue that intimate feelings, desires, and touch between humans are bound to imaginings of race evoked by sound, what I call the racialized erotics of sound. My performance analysis of Radio Raheem meditates on the synesthesia of his sonic and visual dissonance in white male spaces and harmony in Black and Brown spaces. The music from his boombox is a medium that brings attention to Black masculinity’s perceived loudness and homosocial/erotic engagements. Radio Raheem possesses a volume, timber, and vividness of color whose recognition leads to the increased surveillance and subduing of his unmuted presence. Radio Raheem’s rapidly circulated ubiquitous performance is a Black virality that is a synecdoche for Black men who have played and will play their radios loudly. Additionally, Radio Raheem conjures Black men perceived as so powerful that their decibels, inseparable from their racialized gender, are a threat to the peace of white spaces and the livelihood of white bodies.