Black and white in colour: looking across race in Spike Lee’s Clockers and Summer of Sam

This essay focuses on two films by Spike Lee, Clockers (1995), adapted from the novel by the Jewish New York crime writer Richard Price, and Summer of Sam (1999), for which Lee revised an initial script by two Italian Americans, Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli. I argue that while Clockers leaves intact and fails to challenge normative tropes of white responsibility for Black rescue and improvement, Summer of Sam offers a more complex and insightful interrogation of whiteness. The film confounds myths of white superiority by exposing the anxieties, insecurities and fears of difference within an Italian American community. Acts of verbal and physical violence are directed at white alterity even more than people of colour, but both responses are shown to share the same cause, a quest for distinction and self-validation that symbolically denies, yet inadvertently attests to, white fragility.