Okey Dokey, SuperProducer, Actor, and WU-Tang member, RZA sat down with "Shadow & Act" to promote his new movie "Brick Mansions" which co-starred late actor Paul Walker, and had this to say about the growing concern of "Gentrification".. Is he correct? Very opposite opinion from Spike Lee.
During his interview with Shadow and Act, RZA, a native of Brownsville, Brooklyn, shared some pretty interesting thoughts on gentrification:
JT: Part of the movie’s plot is about the struggle between poor people trying to hold onto land and wealthy people coming in to try to develop it. The gentrification
debate is pretty similar to what’s being talked about now in the news.
RZA: It’s happening right here in Echo Park. [Gentrification] is a two-way street. I grew up in Brownsville, but before the blacks were in Brownsville it was a Jewish community. So that’s just the natural process of America. Sometimes it’s negative, sometimes it’s positive. In the case of the Jewish people it was positive because they got to move out of the projects and buy homes. I can look at my own family and see that a lot of us have left the projects and are in brownstones renting. Very few of us can buy. So this is a process that just continues.
JT: So it’s unavoidable, in your view?
RZA: It’s part of the system. And we should actually embrace it and learn how to utilize it. The only way to do that, to me, is to get back into community. With this generation, you don’t even know your neighbors.
Interesting...
Coming to theaters on April 25, Brick Mansions is set inside a walled-in maze of housing projects in a dystopian Detroit, where an undercover cop (Paul Walker) and an ex-convict (David Belle) team up to defeat a deadly drug kingpin’s (RZA) plans to devastate the city.
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