When Spike Lee released Do the Right Thing in 1989, Universal Pictures and much of the press believed that it would spark a race riot. Do the Right Thing did not trigger unrest. Two years later, press and public feared that John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood would start racial trouble. Boyz did not cause rioting. (A few L.A. gang members were denied entry to the film when they roughed each other up after a theater oversold the house. They had not even seen the movie.) Some weeks later, press and public believed Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City would provoke black unrest, which it did not do. This month Spike Lee releases his film biography of Malcolm X, the man touted for 35 years as the instigator of violent racial revolution, which has not erupted.MORE from Penthouse