The Boston Globe

I went to Bedford-Stuybesant the other night.

The stylized Bed-Stuy seen through the aggressive fish-eyed camera lens of Spike Lee. The low-budget setting for the high-volume movie: “Do the Right Thing.”

In the big-city symposia and big-media debates, from the New York Times to “Nightline,” the film has been debated as if it were a player in deteriorating race relations. Is Spike Lee justifying violence? Will “Do the Right Thing” incite riot? So I was prepared to be on new film turf, to be provoked, to watch the scenes roll across Bed-Stuy toward a climax of conflict. I was prepared for a film about race.

But I was less prepared for a film about gender. The much-heralded and masterfully made story of racial conflict is about black and white…men.

This movie about finding and declaring, staking out manhood against great odds, comes down to violence…between men. Spike Lee, a strikingly original talent, put an old male frame around the topic of race and few even noticed the familiarity of that theme.

Are we so accustomed to arguments about violence–the nature of it, the value of it, the inevitability of it–taking place in an all-male setting? Does it go without saying that most discussions about violence are about men? Or does it just go unsaid?

The three visible women in this movie are types, if not stereotypes: A mother figure, a sister, a welfare mother-girlfriend. Not one has a caring permanent man in her life. All three try to whip their males into connection, into responsibility. They are not harmless or brainless. Their weapon is the tongue-lashing. But these women don’t get involved in the battles of will that escalate into physical violence.

The one female bit player and the only woman caught in the action itself screams hopelessly at the rioters to stop.

She too goes unheard. Indeed when Spike Lee, playing Mookie, breaks the glass window of the pizza parlor, beginning the riot, he performs a rite of passage in front of men. There is not a woman to confirm or deny that image of manhood. Where is the African-American woman’s voice in this cultural take on violence?

I don’t mean to suggest that sisterhood is always peaceful, between races or genders. But for the most part, women don’t have trouble deciding when their physical violence is senseless or intelligent. When as reporter or researcher you ask the witnesses of a murder or riot to tell you about it, men are more likely to tell you who was right and who was wrong. Women are more likely to tell you it got out of hand, how it should have been stopped.

Perhaps that’s because women are often victims of one kind or another. They may be perpetrators as well, but for the most part they suffer the losses. Murder may be the greatest cause of death among young African-American men. But women are the mourners, the mothers, the sisters, the wives.

So watching the last scenes of brutality and then of burning, I wondered about the muffled sound of women. Maybe it’s because violence is noisier and grabs attention. Maybe it’s because violence is threatening.

The world isn’t afraid of women. But when academics and bureaucrats turn to black women, they like to talk about “matriarchy.”

Instead, it’s the relative powerlessness of women–the sheer difficulty in making their voices and values heard–that makes it harder and harder to “do the right thing.”