Spike Lee explains expletive-filled gentrification rant

CNN ^ | 2//27/2014

[Altura Ct.]

His parents still live there.

He still keeps an office there.

But it's not the same neighborhood he grew up in, and his feelings about newcomers now inhabiting once-blighted parts of America's most-populous city like Fort Greene slapped many people in the face after the famed director went into an expletive-laced rant during an African-American History Month lecture on Tuesday. Spike Lee on gentrification

"I grew up here in New York. It's changed," Lee said at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, an art, design, and architecture school. "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 mother******* day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. ... The police weren't around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o'clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something."

Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service, said the city has witnessed an enormous recovery since 2001, and the greatest change has been felt in Brooklyn, which has drawn newcomers because of its housing, access to Manhattan and improved safety.

...The new neighbors complain

"Let me just kill you right now," Lee, the "Do The Right Thing" director, told D.K. Smith, a Brooklyn homeowner and tech start-up director, at the speech when Smith brought up the subject of the "other side" of gentrification.

And then he launched his lengthy tirade.

[a fool in paradise]

Grow up, Spike. Everything changes.

"Everything changes, it always does" was the lesson noted in Hollywood Knights (with the closing of a drive-in diner, end of school, and one of the characters going off to Viet Nam in the early 60s).

Here's a clip of Johnny Cash "straight outta Compton" from the 1950s on Town Hall Party, a country western tv program.

"Christoper Columbus Syndrome" indeed, Spike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbCdPD1eBS0

Compton today:

[a fool in paradise]

When whites leave Detroit neighborhoods and the neighborhoods go Mugabe, blacks complain. When whites move into blighted, poor neighborhoods and bring dollars with them, and the living conditions improve, and crime goes down, blacks complain. I’m confused. Should we just hand over our wallets at some gang banger check point and move on happily in the knowledge we probably have an entire closet full of money-stuffed wallets we are willing to part with back at home.

The answer is stay in your neighborhoods, even if other "races" move there. Even if property values drop. Even if your employer no longer requires your services. Accept your beatdown, comrade. It is the price of social justice that you must pay for "white privilege". < /academic bullstalin >