BUCK writes:

The black racialist Spike Lee went on a obscenity-laced rant (see here and here) on Tuesday about gentrification in New York City. The tirade took place during an African-American History Month event and Lee was speaking to an obviously all black audience, after being asked a reasonable question by a man in the audience about gentrification in some of the well-known historic New York City neighborhoods. A paraphrase of his question is: “Why is it a bad thing that a long-time homeowner who lived in a $40,000 home can now sell that home for $3.5 to $4 million?”

Many points can be made about the intellectual dishonesty revealed by Spike Lee’s contradictions and hypocrisies, especially as juxtaposed against Daniel Attila’s story. But the speech, which I have transcribed below, speaks for itself.

Spike Lee begins by saying: “Let me just kill you right now,” to laughter.

Lee: I grew up here in New York. It’s changed. Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers into South Bronx, into Harlem and Bed Sty and Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The government sposed to pick up every motherf****** day. …unaudible….the police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers three o’clock in the morning, down 125th street, that must tell you something! (clapping and hooting)

His interlocutor attempts to inject a thought: “I don’t dispute…”

Lee: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! And even more! Let me tell you some more. (Huge laughter) This is the motherf****** Christopher Columbus syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here! You just can’t come in and vote for it. There have been brothers (inaudible, but I think it’s about hanging and drinking in a particular park) for forty years; now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhibitors (?) said no drunks allowed! (An inaudible rant about something that happened to his father, who the cops were called on because his was playing his guitar too loud) We bought the motherf****** house in 19motherf*******58! And now you call the cops!! In 2013!! Get the f*** outta here! Nah! You can’t do that. You can’t just come into a motherf******* neighborhood and start bogarting (?) that, like you motherf****** Columbus and killing off the native Americans! You can’t do that, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to give more respect! There’s a culture, there’s people, you can just move in and start…here’s another thing! When Michael Jackson died (they wanted to have a party in a park, he rails about whites objecting to crowds of blacks coming into the neighborhood and leaving garbage. Then he says that the particular park is filled with all of their dog waste. He says that they had to move the party to another park.) They just moved into the neighborhood! You can’t come in bogarting, ombudsman, democracy and let everybody live, you gotta have respect! You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations. And you come, now things gotta change because you’re here? Get the f*** outta here! You can’t do that! 3:56 (applause). So what’s good about it?

Interlocutor: I agree with you, I with you, I agree with everything you said.

Lee: Whoa! You talk about the people whose property changed. What about the people renting? They can’t afford it anymore!

Interlocutor: I agree (talk over)

Lee: People can’t afford it. People want to live on … hill, on … street. (Inaudible back and forth about neighborhood names and locations. Lee is screaming about the changing of neighborhood names. Back and forth with the audience about a script that he wrote in 1998.) You might say “there’s more for me, the public schools are better.” Why are the public schools better? First of all, everybody can’t afford, even if you have money …..even if you have money it’s hard to get your kids into those private schools. Everybody wants to go to St. Ann’s. You can’t get into St. Ann’s. You can’t get into……Friends, what’s the other one? (Inaudible) So, I mean, if you can’t get your child into there, I mean, it’s crazy. There is a business now, where you pay, people who don’t even have kids yet, learn to interview, how to get their kids into private school. I’m not lying. So, if you can’t get you kid into private school, if you’re white here, or you can’t afford it, what’s the next best thing? Right, so now they’re going to public schools. So why does it take an influx of (hesitation) white people to get the schools better? 6:36 Why is there more police protection in BedSty and Harlem now? Why is the garbage picked up more regularly? We been here! It wasn’t (inaudible) before. All right, go ahead. (laughter)

Interlocutor: I agree with every single thing you’ve said. (Lee talks over him again, and he fights back; saying “I let you talk, now let me talk,” to groans and snicker from the audience.) My whole point is about wealth creation in the African-American community. Something that we’ve traditionally been locked out of. You bought a house in the ghetto, and three generations and the house is worth nothing in the ghetto. So, for those home owners that did stick in through….we have an opportunity now for wealth creation that we’ve been locked out of. While that may not help the renters, everything that you said was absolutely true, what about that one aspect of wealth creation for people that paid those taxes, that fought to keep the crime down on their block, and all the other things that they did to maintain. The white folks are not moving back because it’s a ghetto. They are moving back because they are beautiful blocks full of beautiful brownstones that have been well maintained by people of color. (tepid applause)

Lee: (Much calmer) Yes, but here’s the thing. To deflate your argument, sir. (Snickering audience) The people you’re talking about are not a great number. Number one, a lot of those people have not keep up with their taxes, so they can’t afford to keep the house. Number two, when the real estate guys were around, and opened up a suitcase with a bunch of money, they’re going to sell it. Many of the people we’re talking about are elderly. They get the money, and the money goes a lot further down south. Black people by droves from New York City – it’s called reverse migration. They’re moving to Atlanta, to North Carolina, they got a house, they got a lawn, they got a back yard, they’ve less taxes…I mean, so NYC is a hard place. You work your whole life and you’re retired, they sell their houses, and I don’t blame them! I can’t say to them “don’t sell you house!” they’re like f*** you Spike. They don’t actually say that but, you have to do some research and look at the numbers. The black population in NYC is going down. Reverse migration. What we have is that, and it’s something that Blasio, I don’t know, he can’t even get the snow off the streets. (laughter) What we need is affordable housing for everybody. 941 But, you can’t afford it. Here’s the thing. ( He names a “most expensive neighborhood, then names a bunch of neighborhoods, that, I assume are the ones way up in value and gentrified.) It works like this: the rents get cheaper the further you go away from Brooklyn. The reality is, after (inaudible) it’s the motherf****** Atlantic Ocean. So, where you gonna go? Where you gonna go? Poor people thinking the same thing. People moving back to Bucks County or moving back to Puerto Rico. You can’t afford to live here any more. And if people can’t afford to live, then 1030 young blacks like you – I mean, there used to be a time when (inaudible) dollars a month, you could get by. You can’t do that any more, so (inaudible) times affordable then the great art that we have is not going to be here. People can’t afford it. So, I’m not, I know what you’re saying, but I don’t see a lot of good coming from gentrification, for the people who live in those neighborhoods.

It winds down with Lee talking about trickery and bamboozling. Mostly inaudible.

— Comments —

Karl D. writes:

Spike Lee has always been a nasty little man who hates white people. I had a Spike Lee experience when I was around 21 in 1988. I was working two jobs at the time. I was assistant manager at a book/magazine shop in East Village and also working at MCA records. Spike Lee would come into the magazine shop once and awhile looking for a specific film magazine. He would often get all bent out of shape and full of attitude if it wasn’t in or was sold out. Almost like it was a personal conspiracy against him. One day when I was working at MCA he walked in. He was friends with one of the black A&R guys there and would come in quite often. When he saw me he did a double take and got this look on his face. “You work here too?” he asked. I just smiled and said, Yup. He kind of grunted under his breath and walked away. It seemed to make him almost angry. He never said another word to me or would even acknowledge my existence.

Hannon writes:

By chance I came across this opinion piece in Time.

The author, John McWhorter, is an associate professor at Columbia no less. He puts up a surprisingly assertive resistance to Lee’s nonsense for a mainstream entry on race, and shares this thought:

 “But history records no human group whose core essence was eternal indignation.”

I would add to “indignation” an oversupply of self esteem and pride, perhaps the most harmful secondary traits a dysfunctional group can have.

James N. writes:

Between 1873 and 1882, most of my ancestors moved from Northwestern Germany to the areas now called Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. They started businesses and churches. My great-great grandfather founded St. Peter’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church on Bedford Avenue, my grandparents were baptized and were married there. One great-grandfather was a greengrocer, another great-grandfather owned a brewery, saloon, and performance space near DeKalb Avenue, where I was born. My great-grandmother was the women’s rifle champion in the 1900 Plattdeutsch Festival in Prospect Park. They were newcomers in every sense of the word.

Then, some other “newcomers” came. They didn’t drive up the rents. They didn’t cause city services to improve. They didn’t demand that the parks and public spaces be safe for women and children. Quite the opposite.

My family lost everything they had when those newcomers arrived and settled down. They had never done anything harmful to these newcomers, they were newcomers themselves once.

In the 1950s, everything went bad at once. The newspaper shut down. The baseball team moved to Los Angeles. Crime surged. Drugs took over the streets in the 1960s. I tried to visit my grandmother’s childhood home (above my great-grandfather’s grocery store) in the 1970s. It was a drug-infested wreck.

Now, my great-grandfather’s grocery store on Fort Greene Avenue has been reclaimed, and is a fancy Italian restaurant catering to the tastes of the latest newcomers. Right nearby, other newcomers who came from Germany, Poland, and the Ukraine after 1945 worship God and raise large families. St. Peter’s is no longer German and is no longer  a ruin, but an evangelical community of newcomers worships there in a different foreign language.

The people Spike Lee is describing settled in Brooklyn after my great-grandparents and before these “newcomers” he complains of. What kind of community they made there is visible for the whole world to see. The latest newcomers want something different, something better.

Good luck to them.

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