In the era of “checking your privilege,” navel-gazing has become the norm.

No comment can be made without first considering the history of your entire life, any lucky breaks you may have had and how you got to this place where you’re allowed to feel what you want and talk about it openly.

But writer Chaya Babu cranked the guilty gut-check to 11 last week when, reflecting back on being the victim of a crime last year at a cafe in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, she made excuses for the man who stole her laptop at gunpoint.

The story was a shocking one. Last November, Ditmas Park experienced a rash of armed robberies. What made the one at the Lark Cafe unique is that the gunman didn’t target the register.

Instead, he took all the laptops of a writer’s group that was meeting there.

In a long rumination on the incident, Babu writes that she and her writer friends “felt angry and violated, but not in a way that necessarily placed blame on the person who did it.”

It seems that if they blame anyone, it’s themselves — for existing and choosing to live in Ditmas Park in the first place.

In the weeks following the robbery, she and her friends worked on “finding space to take into consideration the broader social and economic circumstances surrounding the incident” and “cultivated our sense of compassion toward the robber, whom we imagined must have been acting out of dire need.”

Babu quotes another writer who was robbed that night as saying, “I didn’t ultimately think that person posed a threat. I didn’t feel afraid of the person; I felt more just afraid of the weapon.”

Welcome to the bizarro world of gentrification guilt, where the man with the gun pointed at you isn’t allowed to be “scary” but a weapon with no motive of its own is.

The kicker comes when Babu notes that “many of us in the group agreed that in some respects we identified more with our robber than with the characters we were portrayed to be” in media stories about the crime.

What’s left unsaid in the rationalizing of crime and the self-blame of gentrifiers is how insulting that is to the community of people who have lived there all along.

First, there’s the assumption that the original residents — poorer than the gentrifiers, natch, and often also ethnic or racial minorities — can turn into criminals at any moment at the sight of MacBook hipsterhood. And then there’s the fact that the very people the gentrifiers hope to understand and protect from their provocative latte-sipping are much more affected by criminals

than are the gentrifiers.

After the robbery at the Lark Cafe, the writers turned to online crowd-funding to raise money for new laptops and quickly had enough to afford replacements. The people who have lived in Ditmas Park their whole lives, and have watched the crime rate spike and dip, probably don’t use Gofundme.com when their homes are burglarized by the same people with whom Babu and her friends

sympathize.

I’ve written in these pages before that I have a soft spot for the area. I grew up there, in the 1980s, when it was much more crime-ridden than it is today, and I loved seeing the neighborhood turn around in the last 15 years.

No one made excuses for the criminals when I was a kid. When a friend’s grandmother had her handbag ripped off her arm at the subway station, when a friend was mugged of his jacket in the middle of winter, when bicycles were stolen, no one thought much about the thieves’ feelings. There were no gentrifiers then, no high-rises, no cool restaurants. Plenty of victims, in other words, but none suitable to blame for their own victimization.

Ditmas Park is a neighborhood that just can’t win. In the 1960s the main complaint about the area was “white flight,” as people left the neighborhood’s Victorian mansions to move to the suburbs. Now it’s “gentrification,” as white people have moved back.

Long-time residents of the neighborhood have watched with some amusement as fancy coffee places and bars opened up.

They won’t be laughing if the trend becomes commiserating with the criminals the neighborhood has fought against for so long.