Race and the divide between the races is either the subject or the subtext in many films. The theory of the creation of "the Other" as delineated by Bell Hooks applies to these works and helps illuminate how they handle the issue of race. Hooks's analysis will serve as the critical perspective to be applied to a film overtly about racial tensions and how they develop, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.
Hooks notes how race is used not merely to discriminate against one group or another but to make that group discriminate against itself:
Though systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, racism, actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating, and many of us succumb, blacks who imitate whites (adopting their values, speech, habits of being, etc.) continue to regard whiteness with suspicion, fear, and even hatred (Hooks 338).
Hooks sees blacks as beset by the contradictory longing to possess the reality of the Other, in this case the other race, even if that reality is one that wounds and negates. As Hooks describes it, racial division produces in a given racial group a sense of otherness, that there are real differences between the realities of themselves and the differing racial group. Similarities between groups, those similarities that all share because they are human first, are discounted in the face of the otherness that becomes the defining factor. The dominant force in society becomes the Other for the dominated element, and the values and beliefs of the dominant force become the defining values affecting the dominated class, however negatively:
Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and non-threatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a pow...