Was This Fort Greene Home Vandalized Because of Spike Lee?
Yeah, this isn’t the greatest screenshot. Blame Time Warner Cable on posting crappy online video. That’s what I do.
It’s only been a couple of days since Spike Lee expressed his opinions on gentrification (and hipsters and dog-owners) during an event at the Pratt Institute. Probably because Lee’s opinions included a comparison between gentrifiers and perpetrators of genocide, there was some backlash to the director’s remarks (including this particularly bizarre New York Daily News editorial by Josh Greenman about being… white? and a coffee drinker?). But, you know, it was all Internet backlash, which isn’t the same thing as real life backlash, because the Internet is not really a place at all, you know?
Anyway. That’s all changed, and the backlash suddenly got very real. NY1 reports that someone (or a few someones) “vandalized a Brooklyn home next door to where [Lee] used to live.” This morning, a Fort Greene homeowner discovered that the words “Do the Right Thing” had been spray painted more than once on his brownstone’s façade, and that the window on his front door had been smashed. The homeowner tells NY1 that “he believes the message was meant for the house next door… [because a]t one time, Lee lived there and his father and stepmother still reside in the home.”
If that’s the case, and the vandals were personally offended by Lee’s comments and decided to attack his 85-year-old father’s house to send some sort of message, well, then I kind of don’t know what to say? Other than that I’m dumbfounded by the depths of some people’s idiocy and vindictiveness. I guess what they say is true, never underestimate the stupidity of the entitled American racist.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
