From the Washington Post:
Cory Booker says he grounds his policies in a ‘moral center’ — including his new reparations bill
By Sarah Pulliam Bailey April 11 at 3:53 PM
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced a Senate proposal this week to establish a commission to study reparations, the idea that descendants of slaves should receive some form of payment, calling it “a nationwide effort for truth and reconciliation” in an interview Tuesday.
Several other candidates for the Democratic ticket have supported the general idea of reparations, but Booker appears prepared to lead the issue legislatively. “You have to have healing” when a harm is done, Booker said….
Unlike most Democratic candidates, Booker sees religion as a conversation starter, said Lerone A. Martin, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. …
Booker, who told Religion News Service he regularly meditates and prays on his knees, was raised in an African Methodist Episcopal Church and is now a member of a National Baptist church in Newark.
“I am here because of the black church,” he said.
The black church was not just a place where values and morals were instilled in his parents and grandparents, he said.
“It was a place of safety and security, a protective force shielding children who were dealing with the daily assaults on their dignity, on their pride,” he said. “And it was also a force for social justice.”
I’m fascinated by how Cory Booker asserts he needed a Safe Space to recover from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are constantly launched at America’s beleaguered black youth.
Cory Booker’s parents were both IBM executives, they lived in a mostly white and Asian upscale suburb in Bergen County, NJ, he was the New Jersey Gatorade high school football player of the year, won a football scholarship to Stanford, was elected student body president of Stanford, and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Then he graduated from Yale Law School. He has never since lacked in rich friends to finance his political ambitions.
The only major assault on his dignity and pride of his triumphant first quarter of a century of life was getting cut from what would have been his third season on the Stanford football team by coach Dennis Green (who is black) because he just wasn’t nimble enough (at 6-4″ 220) for big time college football.
Generally speaking, being an upper middle class black male with a solidly 3 digit IQ would seem to be just about the most favorable way to go through life in contemporary America.
