Spike Lee has plenty of love for Brooklyn — just not the hipsters and gentrifiers.
The legendary “Do The Right Thing” director laid into an audience member on Tuesday night, who suggested during Lee’s speech at Pratt Institute there were benefits of gentrification.
“Let me just kill you right now,” said Lee, who then went into a rant about the gentrification that has changed his home borough.
“Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning?” Lee yelled into the microphone Tuesday during his expletive-laced, 90-minute Black History Month speech. “It’s like the m—–f—–g Westminster dog show.”
He blasted what he calls the “Christopher Columbus syndrome” of neighborhoods “discovered” by wealthy gentrifiers — a scourge that’s allowed real estate agents and “m—-f—–g hipsters” to change even the names of neighborhoods like the South Bronx to SoBro or Bushwick to East Williamsburg. “These Williamsburg m—–f—–s are changing the names,” said Lee.
The number of black homeowners who invested in tough neighborhoods decades ago and now stand to make money is small, Lee said, and it wasn’t until whites moved in that city schools, policing and garbage pickup improved.
“Why,” Lee asked, “did it take this great influence of white people to get the schools better?”
Meanwhile, during the Q&A portion of his talk, the lifelong Knicks fan warned a standing-room only crowd of students, Brooklyn residents and Lee fans that he would not be fielding questions about Knicks backup point guard Raymond Felton, who was arrested on felony gun charges early Tuesday morning in connection with his estranged wife.
” I’m not talking about a certain point guard who went to the University of North Carolina,” said Lee. “I’m not talking about that.”
