Hey, Ras–you’re not going to rock the boat, are you?
The hedge-fund managers, the mainstream media, Cami Anderson’s friends in Montclair and Glen Ridge–during the election, they all tried to depict Ras Baraka as a revolutionary, as a radical, as a dangerous man with “fiery” and “incendiary” ideas and close ties to gangs. This was racist libel, of course, and it didn’t work but Newark’s new mayor should consider using those fears to the advantage of the city’s residents.
Baraka himself, speaking at Saturday’s launch of the sensible “Newark Promise” alternative to Anderson’s “One Newark” plan, hinted he is aware of just how nervous the rich and the white are about his ascendancy in New Jersey politics.
He did, after all, speak on the 60th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, a ruling that, with subsequent decisions, outlawed racial segregation in public schools.
“We are still in the same position we were 60 years ago,” Baraka told the crowd of several hundred at Lincoln Park.
“People can’t be talking about school reform without talking about school desegregation,” he said. “There is a deeper segregation going on in the schools.”
He is absolutely right, of course. As a recent Rutgers University study showed, New Jersey’s schools are to so racially isolated that as many as 100,000 African-American children go to school every day without ever seeing a white classmate. The study called the situation “apartheid schools.”
The Star-Ledger’s editorial board fecklessly called Baraka a “a black nationalist”–but they should only wish he was. A black nationalist wouldn’t be talking about school desegregation. He wouldn’t care about racial isolation. No, Baraka is a good, old-fashioned American progressive who believes in all the laws and court rulings Hey, Ras–you’re not going to rock the boat, are you? | Bob Braun's Ledger: