Spike Lee and other sentimental segregationists

I’ve been in Brooklyn so long, I remember when Spike Lee lived here.

When I was in Fort Greene in the late ’90s, living in the predominantly Caribbean Long Island University dorms, our basketball team landed Richie Parker, a fantastic player who came to LIU after he pled guilty to a sexual assault charge and bigger programs dropped him. Parker was explosive, the Blackbirds made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 13 years — and Lee suddenly became a regular at the gym, where he’d stay just long enough to be seen.

That was midway through the first wave of Fort Greene’s gentrification, when mostly African-American newcomers, a mix of artists and yuppies, were filling the neighborhood, which was still rough at the edges and therefore relatively affordable. Lee eventually cashed out, selling his townhouse for a then-record $1 million and moving into a Manhattan mansion.

Good for him, but it does make Lee an unlikely messenger to put on his street voice (most every Brooklyn guy has one) and rail about white people in a talk at the Pratt Institute, which has been a pioneer in gentrifying Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.

Leaving the messenger’s failings aside, Lee’s tough talk about hipsters and whites (he used the two interchangeably) “bogarting” his neighborhood with “Christopher Columbus Syndrome” is a mean idea, an ode to de-facto segregation he propped up with profanity and attitude.

To start with, “hipster” is a nonsense term — a group with no real identity or willing membership. It’s always those people at the other end of the bar.

Further, the idea that the white arrivals’ gains have been black residents’ losses suggests a zero-sum game when, as Lee noted in passing before cursing his way forward, longtime homeowners made fortunes off of the rise in prices, while tenants in the projects and other subsidized housing have reaped the gains from improved schools, cleaner and safer streets and so on.

But Lee, along with the rubes at the website Gawker running essays about the good old days in Bed-Stuy — when weed wafted through the morning air, white people stayed away and things were simple and true — is using complaints about newcomers as a backhanded way to lament the virtues of de-facto segregation, when people knew where they belonged, and where they might get chased out of.

I’m not sentimental for “our” streets and “their” streets, for the not-so-long-ago days when wearing a Celtics jersey in Bed-Stuy might warrant a beat down — an example from “Do the Right Thing” that Lee wistfully referred to at Pratt. Or when Koreans were reviled for “stealing” the bodega business in black neighborhoods (also a subject of the film). Or when black kids got chased across the highway in Howard Beach.

Good old neighborhoods are only that if your group “belongs” in them. When I lived in Borough Park, Haredim would give me the evil eye, because, as a secular Jew, I was keeping the messiah from returning. On Coney Island Ave. last year, a sweet-shop counter guy took the time to tell me the truth about my devilish people. Even in Windsor Terrace, where I live now, a bushy-bearded Jewish guy with an Asian family like me might not have been very welcome 20 years ago in what was then a close-knit white Catholic neighborhood.

The places our tribes mythologize — for mine, the Lower East Side ghetto — are the same closed corners our parents and grandparents worked like hell to get us out of.

When the hipsters or whites or whatever you want to call upper-middle-class people knew their place, so to speak, and kept to the Upper East and West Sides and Park Slope, then moved with their kids to the burbs, they opted out of our shared civic life — our common schools, streets and politics. And the neighborhoods they kept out of had the lousy services Lee’s objecting to.

I’ve spent 12 years warning about the dangers of Mike Bloomberg’s luxury city model, since before Freddy Ferrer told a tale of two cities in 2005 and New Yorkers mostly snored or sneered.

Now, nearly everyone disdains the luxury condos — a misnomer, like so many New York real estate terms, as everything newly constructed is marketed as “luxury” — that will be much of the city’s housing stock in the decades to come, like the brownstones that have gone from high-end homes to row houses and back again.

And Lee, just like he did back when at LIU, is jumping on the bandwagon, adding his voice to a New York tradition as old as the city, bewailing the stupid new money that’s priced out the soul we once had.

What’s rarer, and far more valuable, is investing our lives where we live. Absent that, Spike is just one more cranky old man nattering on about the new arrivals’ rude ways, shallow roots and yappy little dogs.

hsiegel@nydailynews.com