Climate change disproportionately affects minorities and low-income groups. Not only because they are adversely exposed to natural disasters, but also inadequately shielded from the elements, including the sun. 

Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing opens on three title cards. Place – Brooklyn, New York. Time – Present. Weather – Hot as shit! 

Both the directions in the screenplay and dialogue from the characters repeatedly mention that this story takes place on the “hottest day of the summer.” 

Rigged

And for good reason. Rising temperatures are meant to serve as both a metaphor for and contributing factor to rising tension between the African, Italian, and Asian American residents of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant or “Bed-Stuy” neighborhood – tensions which, by the end of the film, culminate in a full-blown race riot, the destruction of a local pizzeria, and the death of a Black man at the hands of white police officers. 

Upon closer inspection, the ominous way Lee describes summer heat foreshadows the film’s violent and apocalyptic climax. “Don’t work too hard,” Mother Sister, the neighborhood matriarch, tells pizza delivery boy Mookie, played by Lee himself, “it’s gonna be hot as the Devil.” 

“If this hot weather continues,” warns ML, one of three elderly men who spent their days lounging on the stoop, and who together are meant to represent the chorus of ancient Greek theater, “it will surely melt the polar caps and the whole wide world – the parts that ain’t water already – will be flooded.” 

At multiple points, Lee describes the sun as “white-hot,” an obvious nod to themes of discrimination and social injustice. 

Ironically – tragically – the only person who appears unfazed by the heat is Radio Raheem, the aforementioned victim of police brutality, a timeless stand-in for Michael Griffith, George Floyd, and countless other real-world victims of a system rigged against them. 

Exhaustion

“By the way he’s dressed,” the script reads, “it could be fall, not the hottest day of the year. But you could never tell it from him. He’s too cool.”

Lee is far from the only person to draw a connection between urban climate and race relations. 

From James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country (“The sun was going down, but the heat had not lessened. The stone and steel and wood and brick and asphalt which had soaked in the heat all day would be giving it back all night”) to Chance the Rapper’s 2013 song Paranoia (“Cause everybody dies in the summer / Wanna say ya goodbyes, tell them while it’s spring. / I heard everybody’s dying in the summer, so pray to God for a little more spring”), there is no shortage of artists – black or otherwise – who use oppressive heat as shorthand for the oppression of minority groups.  

The fundamental question of who will suffer the most from extreme heat, and on a broader scale climate change, is bound to systemic issues of race and class.

Often taken as an effective metaphor, this connection is more literal than one might think. Throughout the years, scientific studies have shown that violent crime in American cities – from robberies to domestic abuse and street fights – rises alongside temperature, with researchers from the University of Southern California finding that such crimes peak on days above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and disproportionally affect minorities and lower-income groups.

Minorities are also disproportionately affected by heat exhaustion, the risks of which are exacerbated by preexisting conditions like heart disease and diabetes, of which they are also at greater risk. 

Wealthy

Data from New York City’s health department from 2011 to 2021 shows that Black New Yorkers were more likely to die of heat exhaustion and hyperthermia than any other demographic, at a rate of 2.2 deaths per million compared to 0.9 deaths per million for White and Hispanic New Yorkers, and 0.4 for Asian and Pacific Islanders. 

Shade and air conditioning can mitigate the effect of heat on health and safety, yet these potentially life-saving resources are similarly divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. 

In an article written for Places Journal in 2019, journalist Sam Bloch traveled to Los Angeles to investigate how the availability of shade in public areas varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, finding – unsurprisingly, perhaps – that wealthy, white parts of the city were better shielded from the sun than poor, predominantly non-white ones. 

“Who decides where the shade goes?” Bloch asks. “You might think transit planners call the shots –strategically placing shelters outside grocery stores and doctors’ offices on high-frequency routes, according to community need – but Los Angeles, like many cities, has outsourced the job. 

"The first thousand shelters were installed in the 1980s by billboard companies in exchange for the right to sell ad space, and they tended to show up in wealthy areas where ad revenue surpassed maintenance costs.” 

Shelter

Bloch notes that, in 2001, the mayor of Los Angeles signed a deal that would double the number of shelters while also giving public officials greater control over where to place them, only to have this plan stopped in its tracks by “politically savvy constituents” opposed to financing a more egalitarian distribution of resources. 

On top of this, bureaucratic red tape often prevents residents of poorly shaded neighbourhoods from taking matters into their own hands. Bloch points to Tony Cornejo, the owner of a barber shop located on the edge of Cypress Park, a 79 per cent Hispanic, 8 per cent Asian neighbourhood. 

As none of Los Angeles’ 1,900 bus shelters were within walking distance of his shop, Cornejo wanted to put up a canopy to shield his customers from an ongoing heatwave, but the city wouldn’t let him. 

“Sidewalk inspectors forced Cornejo to take down the canopy in the summer of 2015,” Bloch writes, “just before the worst heat wave in 25 years rolled through Los Angeles. 

"A spokesperson for the Department of Public Works said sidewalks have to be ‘safe and secure,’ and he pointed to a section of the municipal code prohibiting ‘obstruction in the public right of way.’ Never mind that Cornejo’s shelter, open at both ends, let pedestrians pass freely.” 

Extreme

Bloch notes that, in recent years, gentrification of select neighbourhoods and council members valuing “aesthetic value” over quality of living have resulted in such regulations becoming even more unforgiving, at great cost to Los Angeles’ working poor.  

Articles like Bloch’s not only demonstrate that minorities and lower-income groups are adversely affected by both climate and climate change, but also that this adversity can take the shape of something so mundane yet ever-present as the availability of shade. 

The climate crisis is not just an environmental issue, but a socioeconomic one, too. 

As Ashleigh Albrechtsen, a writer and professor of English at Pasadena City College, concludes in a review of Lee’s Do the Right Thing written for Bright Lights Film Journal, “the fundamental question of who will suffer the most from extreme heat, and on a broader scale climate change, is bound to systemic issues of race and class.”

This Author

Tim Brinkhof studied journalism at NYU and works as a culture reporter at Big Think and Freethink. He has written for Vox, Vulture, Slate, GQ, New Lines Magazine.