Funny Thing: Coming Or Going—Gentrifying Or Fleeing—It’s Always Whitey’s Fault!
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Now, don't go fixing this up--you white racist gentrifiers!
Spike Lee’s notorious February 25 lecture at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in honor of Black History Month., was an expletive-filled, overtly racial, hypocritical rant. During the supposed Q&A, Lee jettisoned the format and steamrolled the adoring liberal white attendees:
Here’s the thing: I grew up here in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It’s changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every [bleepin’] day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. P.S. 20 was not good. P.S. 11. Rothschild 294. The police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street [NS: highly unlikely], that must tell you something….Then comes the [bleepin’] Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart [steal]. There were brothers playing [bleepin’]African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-[bleepin’]-sixty-eight, and the [bleepin’] people moved in last year and called the cops on my father….Nah. You can’t do that…. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people. …And we had the crystal ball, mother [bleepin]’ Do the Right Thing with John Savage’s character, when he rolled his bike over Buggin’ Out’s sneaker. I wrote that script in 1988. He was the first one. How you walking around Brooklyn with aLarry Bird jersey on? You can’t do that. Not in Bed Stuy.[Spike Lee’s Amazing Rant Against Gentrification: ‘We Been Here!’ by Joe Coscarelli, New York Magazine, February 25, 2014]
It’s important to note that the New York Magazine editor who called Lee’s rant “amazing” was not being ironic. Liberal whites must always re-define racist black behavior as something positive, anodyne, or just misrepresented and misunderstood, probably by white racists.
Of course, Lee’s position would only make sense if he still lived in the Fort Greene neighborhood he’d grown up in. In fact, he fled it back in 2000, to live far away from blacks in a $32 million mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. [“Spike Lee’s Upper East Side mansion hits market at $32 million,” by Matt Chaban, New York Daily News, February 2, 2014]
But while Lee insists upon his own right to enter elite white neighborhoods, he simultaneously claims that whites should be banned from so much as wearing a Larry Bird jersey in a “black” neighborhood. Lee’s definition of “respect” isn’t English, but the black street thug version: submission to threats of physical force.
What Lee advocates is Politically Correct asymmetrical apartheid—blacks can live anywhere, but they can also maintain (through force) segregated black neighborhoods. [“Spike Lee and other sentimental segregationists,” by Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, March 4, 2014] . . .
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