Monday, March 3, 2014
On Spike Lee & Hyper-Gentrification, the Monster That Ate New York
The following is part of a larger piece I've been working on to explain hyper-gentrification, today's form of gentrification. It's also a response to the Spike Lee brouhaha. It's rather lengthy. I hope you'll stick with it.
Motherfukkin’ Christopher Columbus
Last week, filmmaker Spike Lee spoke to an audience of students at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. During the Q&A, one student asked if he thought gentrification had its good sides. Spike launched into
a powerful defense of his home neighborhood, Fort Greene, against the incursion of affluent white people. He recalled his childhood, when the garbage wasn’t picked up every day and the police weren’t out making the streets safe. He asked, “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?” An excellent and important question.
As the audience member tried to argue with him, interrupting to say, “Can I talk about something?” Spike turned up the heat, railing against what he called “the motherfukkin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” in which newcomers, usually whites, believe they’ve “discovered” a new neighborhood, as if nothing and no one had been there before them, a common occurrence in the city today. Part of the syndrome includes complaining about the traditions of the people who preceded you. For example, as Lee pointed out, a group of African-American drummers have played in a circle in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park every weekend since 1969. Their presence helped to keep the park safe. Then a luxury condo opened nearby. In 2008, the newcomers—“most of them young white professionals,” according to the
New York Times--started complaining about the drums. They called the police and circulated racist e-mails “advocating violence against the musicians.” The drummers agreed to move away from their traditional spot, and Marcus Garvey Park, named after the black nationalist in 1973, was rechristened by realtors and newcomers with its original nineteenth-century name, Mount Morris Park. No one is quite sure who Mr. Morris was, but you can bet he was a white man.
