aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 04, 2008

Cory Booker: The Color of Politics

From last week’s New Yorker (it arrives late down here and, unfortunately, this piece is not online) a really fine profile of Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, The Color of Politics; A mayor of the post-racial generation:

Booker’s ability to ease into different cultures was put to perhaps its most difficult test when he decided, in 1995, to go to Newark. He subsequently moved into a notorious housing project known as Brick Towers, and lived there until 2006, when the building was condemned… “It was weird,” he said. “I didn’t grow up in Newark, but the time I felt most at home was at Brick Towers.” Booker lived on the sixteenth floor of the building, whose heaters and elevators worked only occasionally. The place was down the street from a crack house. One day, while he was walking with his father, a teen-age shooting victim stumbled into their path and died in Booker’s arms. Brick Towers was Booker’s passage to Newark. “I just felt so at home there,” he told me. “I felt like I was part of something, finally.”

Brick Towers became Booker’s political base in Newark. His residence there, and his legal work on behalf of the project’s fifteen hundred residents, gave him a credential (the Yale law degree meant little in Newark), and it was the president of the tenants association, Virginia Jones, one of Booker’s “professors,” who urged him to run for office. Outside Brick Towers, however, Booker encountered something, in each of his three campaigns, that he had never before really experienced: raw racial prejudice. The Newark grapevine had it that the light-skinned Booker was actually white, an agent of malign outside forces, maybe even the Ku Klux Klan. “He went to Stanford, and he’s Jewish,” Sharpe James declared matter-of-factly on the “Today” show in 2002.

The question of who is and isn’t authentically black touched a nerve in the community. “I think that is one of our deepest prejudices-not recognizing the diversity that is in the black community,” [Cory’s mother] Carolyn Booker says. “You can take it back to slavery, where there was such a divide between the field slave versus the yard slave versus the house slave, in terms of their relationship with the white plantation owner and planter. Which then gets you into the whole color thing-what shade you are. They thought I was white. ‘He has a white mother,’ they’d say. Some columnists still write that he’s from a racially mixed family. I find it almost comical, because surely, at some point back in my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s generation, that was true. But as we go down the line, from my grandmother, who was married to a black person, to my mother and father, who are both black, to Cary and me, who are both black-I don’t know how you get there. But, obviously, the skin color, the eyes, the straight hair, says, Well, you physically don’t look like I look, so, therefore, your experience couldn’t possibly be like my experiences.”

Booker’s a big Obama backer [LATER: it’s reciprocal: “Newark Mayor Cory Booker was pretty much anointed as the next Obama by none other than Obama, who called Booker ‘a shining star, a rising star-not just in New Jersey but in the nation.’"]; he’s no doubt helped move Hillary Clinton down to under 50% in four different New Jersey polls.

Like Obama, Booker’s presidential potential has been noted by the political pros and the media almost from the start. Booker was approached about running for the senate in 2002. Casting his lot with Newark, he declined—and went on to lose his mayoral bid. (The story of that race is told in the documentary film Street Fight.)

He ran again and in 2006 won by a record margin:

“It’s this weird moment,” Booker told me a couple of months later. “I’m elected to the highest job of my life, something I’ve been aspiring to for years, and you’d think I’d feel this great sense of independence and power. But it’s not so. It’s the time of my life when I actually feel- maybe not weaker, but more dependent upon others than ever before. And that my success is completely dependent upon how other people are doing.”

The article is not online. But they do have his talk with David Remnick from last year’s 2007 New Yorker Conference, “2012: Stories from the Near Future,” in which he discusses “post-racial politics.”