Word: bensonhurst
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...issues is equally deceptive. There is a constant drumbeat, especially from Republicans, that personal racism is dead. Long live self-help! Even the bilious Strom Thurmond, former segregationist, wrapped himself in the Thomas flag. Public outcry against racism today amounts to scare headlines about incidents like Crown Heights or Bensonhurst, blown up larger than life, and declaimed: "This is terrible. We must eliminate...
...overt racism of the Bensonhurst kind is an aberration. Racism--News Flash--is not gone. Institutional racisms--racisms which are nobody's fault in particular, but which are more pernicious for going unseen-haunt our society...
...Right Thing had critics predicting that the film would foment wildings by blacks against whites. Racial violence did erupt in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood that summer, but the victim was a black man, Yusuf Hawkins, whose murder inspired Jungle Fever. "He was killed for supposedly coming to visit ((a young Italian-American woman))," Lee notes, "when all he wanted to do was look at a used car. But sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white Southern...
...reason for her rancor. Her architect husband, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), has wandered into the sexual curiosity of his Italian- American secretary, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra). Their affair, which they confide to friends, is soon the talk -- the shout -- of their respective neighborhoods, Sugar Hill in Harlem and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. The animosities are mirrored in two subplots. Angie's sweet, nerdy friend Paulie (John Turturro) pursues a romance with a classy black woman (Tyra Ferrell). And Flipper's crackhead brother (Samuel L. Jackson) collides with his Bible- bred parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby...
...really two movies in one: the first hour an essay on various volatile issues, the second a dramatization of how these issues inform and ruin ordinary lives. Lee tries hard to spread the intensity, and the ignorance, judiciously. He lets a geek chorus of Italian- American guys in Bensonhurst blame black men for everything from Central Park rapes to the mongrelization of jockdom. "They took our sports," one fellow grouses, "baseball, football, basketball, boxing. What do we got left? Hockey...