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The fifth mural I shot was in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the swiftly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood made famous by Spike Lee’s landmark film Do the Right Thing. In fact, the Bed-Stuy mural directly references that movie by depicting the character Radio Raheem. At the start of the movie, Radio Raheem blasts Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” from his boombox like a reveille. Near the movie’s end, he’s choked to death by a nightstick-wielding cop—a pivotal plot point that incites a riot, much like the uprisings that followed the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles, and the Freddie Gray verdict in Baltimore, and the Michael Brown verdict in Ferguson, which reverberated across the country like so many waves of heat.

In New York, I remember the Ferguson protesters took to the streets chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” I myself was drawn to the vortex of 125th Street, where I shot pictures of the crowd swarming toward the Triborough Bridge. I paused there at the edge of my own reason sometime before midnight to return to my children, but the mob pushed on as far as the tollbooths on the Manhattan side, succeeding in shutting the bridge down. It felt so logical an impulse, to act unruly in the face of misrule. Yet this impulse is what the Bed-Stuy mural admonishes against.

Radio Raheem’s fist is the focal point of the mural, adorned with its gold “LOVE” knuckleplate. The mural, dominated by the color red, cautions the viewer to “Stay calm and in control. Don’t get into an argument . . . Don’t resist, even if you believe you’re innocent.”

The man I photograph walking past the love punch wears paint-splattered work boots, a headcloth over his dreadlocks, and earphones. I wonder what he’s listening to. Perhaps because he’s distracted by his music, he’s unaware that I’ve shot him with my phone.