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The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

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From Page to Stage: Newark in Black and Blue in 2004

In the Fall of 2004, I was teaching a course at Rutgers University in Newark called “From Page to Stage” where the idea — as I was teaching the course — was to take original scripts written in class and present them in live performance to learn how the process of active creation worked.

The final project was a series of group presentations where students shared their lives as they were living it — and the alarming result of one racially diverse group was: “Newark in Black and Blue.”  That group’s bruising presentation was tough and blunt and dramatic and I decided we had to record that performance in audio so we could preserve the truth of the moment.

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LinkedIn and the Promise of Minority Equality in the Age of Internet Access

Yesterday, I posted an image Janna took over the weekend to my social media circles, and I was surprised to read this morning how concerned some were over what I thought was a joyous image of young Black females in the urban core being involved in a connected electronic Age.  The action was happening on LinkedIn, and here is that discussion — I don’t know if you can read it by default, or if you have to be linked to me first or not — and here is the image that started it all:

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Bring Back Continental Airlines!

I take back every nasty thing I ever said about Continental Airlines:

The insidious reality that Continental limits participation and requires documentation for Bereavement plays into the idea that you’re getting a great deal when you are not. It certainly appears Continental is preying on your loss and your broken heart to line their pockets and to blacken their bottom line.

It disgusts me when companies take advantage of the emotional despair that comes in waves of mourning and longing and yearning and companies like Continental Airlines deserve to have their Bereavement fares mocked online and wholly identified as an inconsolable and inconsiderate scam.

Yes, yes, I give in!  I take back every single bit of it all, now that United Airlines have corrupted my previously unbeloved and loathsome Continental brand — just give us back Continental!

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Beware: Newark is not New York!

Years ago, when I was teaching at several New Jersey colleges and universities, a few of my students randomly confided in me how they felt purposefully ripped off by their Newark college admission offices.  They believed they were tricked into studying in Newark instead of New York City.

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The Sworn City: Thin Blue Line Gets Thinner in Newark

On Tuesday, the city of Newark unconscionably laid off 167 police officers.  That is a stunning amount of shields no longer protecting a killing urban core and we are immediately propelled back to the death days of August 2007 and Murder at Ivy Hill.

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Zuckerberg Foots the Newark Schools Bill

After New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s administration shamefully lost $400 million in Federal education funds for the State because of an error in their application, the school system in the Garden State was looking woefully undervalued and critically underfunded.  Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, pledged $100 million of his own money to specifically help the blighted Newark, New Jersey school system.

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One in 99: Number One as the Prison Nation

The United States is now the number one nation of the incarcerated in the world. The Pew Center on the States released a new report that one in 99 Americans is a prisoner in the nation’s overcrowded jail and prison system.

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Freeing Dark Impulses: The Danger in Arresting Psychotropic Drugs

It is our responsibility as cogent human beings to ban all handguns. We’ve felt the massacre at Virginia Tech. We know the horror of the gangland killings in Newark. We live with the regret of eight dead in Omaha. We’re still freshly frozen from the  aftermath of last week’s multiple Northern Illinois University assassinations:

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That Does Not Happen Here

I answered the phone yesterday afternoon and heard the distraught voice of a friend of mine from Omaha. She kept repeating, over and over, as if her impromptu mantra would change history and peel back time: “This doesn’t happen here. This happens there. Where you are. Not here. Not here. Not here.”

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