Spike Lee set his incendiary film about race relations on a sweltering summer day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Still relevant and powerful, Do the Right Thing introduced the world to Lee’s controversial in-your-face filmmaking style. The movie stands as Lee’s most ambitious project and in my opinion was 1989’s best film. Its unapologetic approach to the subject of racism in America earned it a place among the most socially and politically important films of the decade. Point in fact, the problems presented in Do the Right Thing still exist today, almost twenty years later.

The following scene expresses the movie’s central theme utilizing Lee’s uniquely energetic prose. Here is the story of Love and Hate as told by the character Radio Raheem.