[Extract ...] In the pivotal scene of episode 9 of Spike Lee’s acclaimed television series She’s Gotta Have It, a town-hall meeting in the local preservation society’s office brings together key characters to discuss the problems generated by the gentrification of their neighbourhood, the Brooklyn borough of Fort Green (Lee 2017). At the meeting, there is a clash between a group of older Black residents, including the protagonist, artist Nola Darling, and Bianca, the white, middle-class woman who is chairing the meeting. Bianca has just bought the nineteenth-century brownstone next door to Nola’s house. Things get tense between the Black and white residents. An irritating, arrogant character, Bianca attacks Pablo, another Black artist and long-term neighbourhood resident, who is now homeless, for allegedly vandalising her street and scaring the new (richer, mostly white) residents. Bianca is obsessed with ‘[her] brownstone’ and lambasts both the graffiti on its restored façade and the visual signs of poverty and displacement that she has indirectly contributed to. Bianca prizes historic authenticity in the form of buildings but not in the form of the culture of the people who have made her neighbourhood what it is. This is a classic scene of New York-style gentrification, of which these brownstones are a symbol.