Spike Lee (better if you listen to him https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gentrification https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-l

Spike Lee (better if you listen to him https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gentrification https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gent...): Let me just kill you right now, because there was some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the good of gentrification. 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 motherfuckin’ 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, that must tell you something. Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ 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-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here! Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people. Read the rest of the transcript here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazi...