Interracial Politics In Jungle Fever, By Spike Lee

In Jungle Fever, Spike Lee focuses on the interracial politics by exposing the audience to the social taboo of the mixed-race relationships. The movie is a social commentary of the directors’ personal convictions about interracial intimacies. Likewise, Do the Right Thing (1989), the film was influenced by a real life incident that took place in the summer of 1989 at Bensonhurst neighborhood in New York City. The opening frame of the film is a dedication to the memory of Yusef K. Hawkins, an African-American sixteen-year-old boy who was shot to death by few Italian-American locals. Hawkins visited the neighborhood with his friends in order to buy a used car, but the gang members attacked him for dating an Italian-American girl from the neighborhood.

In 1955, the cruel murder of Emmett Louis Till, an African-American fourteen-year-old boy who was lynched from two white men in Mississippi for flirting with a white married woman, caused an international outcry for the racial hatred and opposition to interracial relationships. However, dominant ideas about interracial relationships and their view as “a threat to the nation and civilization” (Sundstrom 146) derived from the word miscegenation. In 1863, a pamphlet with seventy-two pages appeared in the newsstands of New York City under the title “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro” (Altman). The particular coinage was invented by the author in order to replace the world “amalgamation” that was not scientifically adequate to describe the mixed race relationships. Thus, borrowing from the Latin word miscere (to mix) and genus (race), David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman invented the term miscegenation, which was an issue quite “inflammatory” by the racist standards of 1863 . Especially, after the re-publishing of the pamphlet in 1864, white America became obsessed with “sex across the color line”, and then “stereotypes of black men's alleged craving for white women, along with believers in Anglo-Saxon ‘racial’ superiority who feared that ‘mongrelization’ was degenerative” (Altman), started to