Lee’s use of John Turturro’s olive skin and voluminous hair makes racial ambiguity a kind of wordless speech. Pino hates “niggers” but loves Magic Johnson. And none of his bluster can dull his brother Vito’s budding friendship with Mookie, or Sal’s obvious crush on Jade, Mookie’s sister (played by Spike’s real-life sister, Joie Lee). After all the violence, Mookie and Sal share one last scene that starts with acrimony but ends up feeling like the beginning of a resolution. Buggin Out tells Mookie to “stay black,” but Tina simply begs him to be a man. Nobody to whom both those designations pertain ever really has a choice.

We will always be disappointed with Spike Lee if we expect him to be something other than essentially, if pessimistically, liberal—a wary synthesist, stuck between sides of the stereo. He respects and loves the radicals, admires their bombast and unbounded, readily apparent love for the race and its people, but in the end won’t see their premises all the way through. Just before the credits, two quotations scroll down the screen—one by Malcolm, defending political violence in self-defense; one by Martin, ruling it out. This undigested dialectic has, more or less, been our racial-political reality, from the nineties on forward.

The most fitting culture hero for Do the Right Thing might be Nelson Mandela, who isn’t mentioned in the film but seems to me to hover over it invisibly. In some ways, Lee’s tightly circumscribed story has more in common with the South African dynamic of white minoritarian rule—Sal and his sons are the only white people in sight, save that cyclist—than with the broad narrative of majoritarian terror in America. Mandela was released from prison less than a year after Do the Right Thing came out and wasted little time in running successfully for the presidency. Soon, the former radical who had once ardently defended the right of the oppressed to engage in revolutionary violence was heralded as a global symbol of peace and reconciliation.

Raheem—so exquisitely human; just a guy who keeps to himself and loves his music—is made to accommodate similar polarities. The first time we hear him talk at length, he’s showing an admiring Mookie his pair of brass four-finger rings. They look sharp and well-kept and vaguely dangerous. One says love and the other says hate. The camera takes him straight on and flattens him into a sort of painting: we see the rings flashing, the row of brownstones spread wide behind him like a pair of Technicolor secondary arms, his “Bed-Stuy Do or Die” T-shirt and the odd focus in his eyes. He shadowboxes toward the camera, acting out the ongoing battle between the two moral modes—they depend on each other, like percussion in the left ear and a horn line in the right. Love gets the KO, but hate hangs in there, just in case.