ENGLISH SPEECH CORY BOOKER Let America Be America Again English Subtitles
¬¬I’m in this weird state in my life where
I’m incredibly excited.
I literally get up every morning with this
amazing enthusiasm about what can be but this
very deep sober understanding of what is.
I feel this amazing, awesome, sense of vision
about where we are – could go as a country,
what I desperately believe is our destiny.
But I get very humbled when I look at the
challenges.
And I want to jump into this in a way that
you may not expect.
But I would like to take us to what is a reality
for thousands and thousands of Americans and
a moment of mine when I wasn’t in selected
offic¬¬e.
It was 2004.
It was April.
My father was visiting me for my birthday.
And we were taking a walk in my neighborhood.
I lived at that point in the central ward
of Newark.
Newark is a City of great diversity with wealthy
neighborhoods, with poor neighborhoods.
This was one of the poor census tracts in
our city.
I was living in some high-rise public housing
projects.
We were walking down the road.
I will never forget the gunshots that rang
out sounded like cannon fire because they
echoed between many of the buildings.
I turned around to see kids running down the
hill towards me screaming.
I sprinted through the children to get to
the steps where I saw another kid sort of
holding onto the bannister, stumbling backwards.
And I caught him in my arms.
Looked over his shoulder and I saw his white
T-shirt filling with red blood.
I remember putting him down on the ground,
screaming at people to call an ambulance.
And blood just seemed to be coming from everywhere.
I found out his name.
His name was Juazin.
I drew my hands into his bloody shirt, having
no medical training whatsoever, just trying
to stop the blood.
It was like nothing you see on TV.
There was no eloquence about it.
It was just messy and disgusting.
Blood was pouring from his mouth.
I stuck my fingers in because I heard him
gagging, trying to clear his airway.
It was continuous.
It seemed like hours until the ambulance finally
arrived.
By that time, his body was lifeless.
I was pushed out of the way.
They ripped open his T-shirt, and he had three
bullet holes in the front of his chest and
one on his side.
I remember getting up off the grass where
I was just sitting watching the emergency
personnel try to save his life.
And he was, unfortunately, by that point dead.
And walking over to my dad who looked at me
covered in another boy’s blood, and I insisted
he went home.
I stayed and talked to the police.
I went home.
I lived on the top floor of these projects.
I walked up the steps, 16 flights.
Get to the door.
My dad opens the door.
We have this moment where we’re just staring
at each other.
Now, my dad is a guy who says all the time
that he is the result of a grand conspiracy
of love.
And, thus – and, therefore, you are, son,
not only born in a – from a grand conspiracy
of love; but you were born on third base.
And don’t ever think you hit a triple.
Your father was born – your father was born
to a single mother.
Born poor.
And, in fact, he’ll get upset with me if he
hears me call him born poor.
“I was just po', p-o.
I couldn’t afford the other two letters.”
And he was born in a viciously segregated
town in the mountains in North Carolina.
He was born where his mother couldn’t take
care of him.
He was raised by his grandmother.
11% of kids in my city, or around that, are
raised by their grandparents.
His grandmother couldn’t take care of him,
and then he was taken in by the community.
And it was the community that intervened with
him, that conspired to make sure he got on
the right track in school when he couldn’t
afford go to college and said he was going
to put it off to work, they said, “You’ll
never go to college.”
So he tells me this story about getting envelopes
full of dollar bills so that he could pay
his first semester’s tuition and get a job
at North Carolina Central University, a small
historically black college in North Carolina.
And then his life then became a story of interventions.
He was able to graduate, got his first job
thanks to blacks and whites coming together
through the Urban League and helping companies
hire blacks for the first time.
Interventions.
He then moved into the first house that I
grew up in because of an organization called
the Fair Housing Council.
Blacks and whites coming together sent out
a white test couple who worked with my parents
to break open a town that I grew up in as
my father called us when we moved in, he called
us the four raisins in the tub of vanilla
ice cream.
But my dad would sit me at the kitchen table
and tell me these stories.
And it was a conspiracy of love that got us
to where we are.
And so now I’m sitting in this doorway with
my dad staring at me with a boy’s blood on
myself.
And I sort of pushed past him and said, “Dad,
I just want to go to the bathroom.”
And I walked in and I closed the door on my
father, my history, my rock, and I stared
at myself in the mirror and began to try to
scrape this boy’s blood off my hands.
And I am a guy that suffers from a severe
case of BO.
Don’t worry about it, people moving their
chairs back.
Bold optimism.
At this point, I’m staring in the mirror,
my hands are shaking.
The blood is off my hands.
I keep scrubbing because I just feel the blood
on my hands.
And I felt myself becoming choked with an
anger that just is rare to my being.
And I felt angry at this nation that professes
where children sing a chorus to our country
every day that we are one nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all.
But there’s such a dramatic between the – how
could everybody in this room know who I’m
talking about when I say Natalie Holloway
or JonBenet Ramsey, but not one person in
this room could name a kid that was shot this
year in an inner city.
And there were thousands.
I became frustrated with who we claim to be,
but the savage realities of who we are.
I then I walk out and I look at my father,
who says to me, “Son, I worry about our nation.
What battles we have fought, my generation,
the generation before me.
How we emboldened this democracy, how we made
it more real and made it more true, but now
I worry that a boy born to a single mother
in a poor neighborhood, in a segregated neighborhood,
who couldn’t be raised by his mother, was
taken in by others, that was born in those
circumstances in 1936 has a better life chance
to make it than a child born under the same
circumstances in 2006 or 2010.”
My father, I felt like he was indicting my
generation, this generation of astounding
achievement, this generation of incredible
advancement and access.
And he was standing there, looking at me,
his son, who was so shaken, and he, this optimistic
man, who believes deeply in this country and
this nation, as he calls it, a conspiracy
of love, how he could there suddenly be doubtful.
And I left that apartment the next morning,
and I walked down the stairs, and I slammed
into the presence of a woman named Ms. Virginia
Jones.
And she is – was the tenant president of
those buildings and had been since the day
they were built.
She was an elderly woman.
She was about five foot and a smidgen, but
I look up to her.
And I didn’t even have to have a conversation
with her.
I saw the back of her head and my funk just
disappeared.
And I suddenly felt this sense of hope and
excitement again.
And the funk disappeared because I interviewed
her a few years earlier for an article I was
writing a couple years earlier for an article
I was writing for esquire.
And I told them I wanted to write about American
heroes and I picked a woman nobody heard about.
In the course of interviewing her, this fearsome
woman who had done so much personally.
In fact, on my first day meeting her, I was
still a Yale Law student, she brought me into
the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard,
and said to me, “You want to help me?”
I was lost, and I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
And she said, “Okay.
If you want to help me, look around you.
What do you see?”
And I described a crack house, graffiti, all
the problems.
Then she just looked at me and said, “You
can never help me.”
And I said, “What are you talking about?”
And she looked at me hard, and she said, “Boy,
you need to understand something, that the
world you see outside of you is a reflection
of what you have inside of you, and if you’re
one of those people who only sees problems
and darkness and despair, that’s all there’s
ever going to be.
But if you’re one of those people who stubbornly,
every time you open your eyes, you see hope,
you see opportunity, you see possibilities,
you see love, you see the face of God, then
you can probably help me.”
And I remember, she walked away on that first
moment of meeting her, I looked at my shoes,
I said, okay, grass hop per, thus endeth the
lesson.
So, when I walked out from that building,
there’s a story that I remember was her
telling me about her son who fought for the
U.S. military, who came back to this country
and was visiting his mother, his mother got
a knock on the door, Ms. Jones did, the woman
couldn’t speak, she was crying,
she got grabbed by the woman, dragged down
five flights of stairs, and there was her
son, shot to death in the lobby, bleeding
it red.
She told me she fell to her knees and wailed
into the echoes of the lobby.
I looked at her when she finished that story,
and I said, Ms. Jones, I know where you work.
She worked for the prosecutor’s – she and
I paid market rent to live in these – these
buildings.
And I said, “I just – I don’t understand.
Why do you still live here where you have
to walk through the lobby of the building
where your child was murdered?”
And she looked at me almost like she was insulted
by the question.
She said, “Why do I still live here?”
“Yes.”
“Why am I still in apartment 5A?”
“Yes, Ms. Jones, why.”
And she goes, “Why am I still the tenant president
from the day these buildings were built 40
years ago?”
And I said, “Yes, Ms. Jones, why.”
And she stuffed out her chest and she said,
“Because I’m in charge of homeland security.”
To me, this is what keeps my fired up in Newark,
is that I live in a city with the most stubbornly
hopeful, the most audaciously determined individuals
who have not given up on the truth of the
American dream and confront in every moment
the unfulfilled, unfinished dream.
And there are people that realize in an intellectual
and spiritual way that if we who are on the
front lines of this fight for America can’t
solve this problem, the country as a whole
will suffer.
As Langston Hughes said, “There is a dream
in this land with its back against the wall.
To save the dream for one, we must save it
for all.”
And what gives me hope is, after five years
in a job which people told me would grind
down my idealism, which would squeeze out
my optimism, my hope, which would make an
idealist a realist, I’m telling you that I
am hope unhinged.
Because I see the national problems that we
have every day when I leave my apartment in
Newark, New Jersey.
And I see how they are cancer on the soul
of this country and our economy.
But I also see Newark, New Jersey, like so
many other cities, are littered with examples,
are littered with models that demonstrate
to us that there is a way out, and, in fact,
that our challenges do not reflect a lack
of capacity to deal with them.
They reflect a lack of collective will.
And this is what has me both so fired up and
angry, but also incredibly hopeful and full
of love.
Let me deal with two complex problems.
And I love talking about these problems to
people of any political persuasion, because
whether you are somebody who hates big government
or believes in government, you have to join
with me in saying that perhaps some of the
greatest waste in America right now is the
fact that we’re investing in systems that
produce such abhorrent failure.
The criminal justice system is one of those
systems that we spend billions of dollars,
billions of dollars annually, in a correctional
system in New Jersey, for example, that does
nothing to correct the problems.
The other system is this system of public
education that right now is failing to prepare
the majority of our children for a 21st century
economy that is a knowledge-based economy.
The more you learn, the more you earn.
And forget about earn, the more you contribute,
the more you grow.
Now, the criminal justice system, actually,
my team said, this is crazy.
My friend, Michael Bloomberg, says this all
the time.
We’re unconscious to the fact that every day,
we are a Virginia Tech in America.
Every single day, there’s 30 plus people murdered
in our city, countless more that are shot,
every day.
And I always joke with my friends, I said,
you know, guys who get shot don’t show up
to the hospital with health insurance.
In fact, we found out the victims of shootings
in our city, about 83 or 84% of them have
been arrested before.
And the average arrests are ten times that
they have been engaged in the criminal justice
system as adults, not to mention their child
arrests.
We couldn’t believe it when we started seeing
this pattern that we have in America of criminality
that becomes ingrained.
In fact, generationally ingrained, because
the children who most likely go to prison
in America are children of incarcerated adults.
And so we started looking at this system and
saying, why are we engaged in this ridiculous
game that we believe that somehow there’s
some correlation between the more arrests
we do and the lower crime.
There’s no correlation whatsoever.
And my police officers, one of them was here,
sitting over there on the side – yes, he
has his gun with him.
Jim Stier, behave yourself, or we’re coming
after you.
My police officers could drive by corners
and name the guys there.
And when we would get out in the corners and
I would engage the fellows, the fellows would
know who the police officers are.
And so we started saying that there has to
be the ability for Americans to innovate a
way out of this.
There’s got to be a way to create radical
shifts in realities.
We said, let’s start experimenting with system
change to demonstrate in a policy way that
we have choices in America to make.
And so we started looking around.
Who is doing something to end this nightmare
that when a person is arrested, that they
won’t leave a system with 60-plus, 60 to 70-plus
come right back?
So we started trying to find new ways.
We looked at programs all around the country.
First of all, we found out when we interviewed
guys that they come out and they all express
a desire to do the right thing.
One of my friends who’s very involved in the
criminal justice system, guys on the street,
says, 5% are knuckleheads.
You can go to any profession, from politicians,
to you name it, 5% of us are knuckleheads
and belong under a prison.
But 95% actually are far more rational economic
actors than you think.
So a guy coming out of prison who can’t get
a driver’s license, they know who they are
to arrest him, but he comes out, doesn’t have
identification, it’s an amazing struggle,
doesn’t want to go see the mother of their
children because they owe them so much money
in child support payments.
Has warrants out for their arrest because
in prison they had a traffic ticket, became
a failure to pay, failure to appear, with
a warrant.
All of these administrative law problems,
we start listening to them and said, okay,
let’s innovate.
We found out there was no legal support for
these guys.
So we pulled all our law firms in Newark together
to create the nation’s first pro bono legal
service project.
And we said to the law firms, help us stop
crime.
A little bit of administrative law help can
help these guys.
It was amazing.
The law firms found that their associates
were loving it, because the liberated the
economic potential of guys, helping them expunge
records, get driver’s licenses and IDs.
We said, look at these guys, they’re coming
out and they need rapid attachment to work.
This is a bad economy.
But let’s find out ways to get them attached
to work.
We’ve done everything in Newark from partnering
with businesses to start a niche in our city.
We didn’t have any fumigation businesses based
in Newark.
We started solely for the purpose of hiring
guys when they come home.
It’s called Pest at Rest.
I did not think of the name.
We realize guys, there’s got to be a better
marketer in this room, please.
It sounds like a spa for bugs.
We found out that guys coming home, that one
of the biggest things they said they wanted
to be, imagine this, was great fathers.
But yet they were often absentee fathers.
And you talk to them about why that was, and
there were logical reasons that they had for
not being involved in their kids' lives.
So we created a partnership program with these
guys where we brought in other men to be mentors
to the guys, fathers being mentors to other
fathers.
We actually created a fraternity of men around
it.
It wasn’t in a fraternity at Stanford, but
I wanted to create one, so we created Delta
Alpha Delta Sigma, DADS.
And we had parenting classes.
I learned how to be a dad even though my parents
are saying, why aren’t you one.
I learned how, because at 5:00 in the morning,
when I was in first grade, the first sound
I would hear on a snow day was my dad shoveling
snow, because he was going to get to work.
We started having group activities for the
women, and helped the men negotiated child
support payments, took care of everything,
and before you knew it, we had this program
that now over five years has a recidivism
rate not where New Jersey’s is, about 65%.
It has a recidivism rate lower than 3%.
We have a program now, a one-stop center,
partially funded by the Manhattan Institute.
I got a right-leaning think tank in New York,
partnering with grass-roots activists who
can’t say the word Republican without gagging,
but partnering in Newark city hall with a
program right now that for the men that come
to our – men and women who come to our program,
we have a 70% placement rate for jobs, working
with local companies.
That one small aspect of our program has saved
the state of New Jersey millions of dollars.
We are Americans.
There is nothing we can’t do.
But we allow ourselves to get caught in the
grooves of a record playing the same old tired
song over and over again, surrendering our
power, surrendering our authority, surrendering
our responsibility.
In fact, we get into a state of what I call
sedentary agitation, where we see the kids
shot on TV and inner city.
We’re upset about it, but we take no responsibility
for it.
We don’t get up and do something about it.
We fail to say that our destiny is fully linked
up with the destiny of another American.
And I know it is.
Go to Google and put in the words, “McKinsey
disparity education.”
A report will pop up, a 2009 McKinsey report,
where they looked at the impact in America
of the disparities of educational outcomes
alone.
They said the impact on GDP alone is about
1.3 to 2.3 trillion dollars, trillion dollars.
You see, something I know is that genius is
equally distributed in America, equally distributed.
You’ll find it everywhere from inner cities
to suburbs, from farm areas, and that our
greatest natural resource as a nation is the
minds of our children.
But yet we’ve rolled them away in more of
a gross offense than the oil spill in the
Gulf.
And the reason why I get excited about this
problem is because we’ve shown ways of solving
it.
I could take you to Newark, New Jersey, right
now, and show you schools in my city that
are outperforming the wealthiest suburbs.
The answers are there.
The question is, do we have the will?
I talked to the Ford Foundation and they’re,
like, we’ve spent lots of money in investment,
but we know some of the things that actually
work.
We’re doing them in Newark now.
Some of our schools just take simple equations.
Like, when I was going to school, time was
a constant, achievement was the variable.
You go to school 180 days in New Jersey.
If there’s a snow day, they’re going to smack
another one on.
Even if we were, like I was, in Harrington
Park Elementary, sitting in the cafeteria
watching reruns of The Little Rascals.
You’re going to be in that building 180 days.
Look at contracts for teachers and principals,
it’s all about time.
My highest-performing schools in Newark have
switched that equation around and said that
achievement is going to be the constant; time
is going to be the variable.
They go to school, longer school days, longer
school weeks.
We have Saturday classes, mandatory Saturday
classes.
Longer school years.
And funny enough, that’s what our competitor
nations are doing.
The answers are out there.
Whether in reforming our criminal justice
system, I can tell you from all over our country,
incredible things in innovations are going
on.
In education, we see things that are working
but we are lacking the political will, the
collective will, the individual will.
I’m a mayor of a big city.
I have got a lot of things to do.
But I see it all the time.
If every American who was able just mentored
a kid – You can actually do online mentoring
now.
All mentoring, I have seen study after study
shows you drive down the level of criminal
activity.
You drive down the level of early sex practices.
You drive up the success of schools.
But, yet, we as Americans, who drink deeply
from wells of freedom and liberty that we
did not dig, we lavishly eat from banquet
tables that were prepared for us by our ancestors.
We are too often just sitting around getting
drunk on the sacrifice and struggle of other
people’s labors and forgetting that we are
a part of a noble mission in humanity, the
first nation formed not as a monarchy, not
as a theocracy but as an experiment, an idea
that a diverse group of people, that when
we come together, e pluribus unum, that we
can make a greater whole out of the sum of
our parts.
So here we are, standing at a crossroads in
our country.
We are cannibalizing ourselves by segregating
our populations: Poor and not poor; educational
access and lack thereof; high-crime areas,
spending more and more money; and finding
ways to liberate people from these dead-ends
of life, from the carnage of human potential.
And to me it is a choice, just like every
moment of our life is.
We either choose to accept conditions as they
are or take responsibility for changing them.
Well, I know what our history is.
I know what the calling of our ancestors is.
And so I will end, and I’m looking forward
to our panel with a poem that I’ve begun to
say more and more, that my parents would read
to me as a child, as they would tell me the
stories of how lucky I was to be born where
I was, how lucky I was to have the opportunities
I have, how the experience I was having as
a young Black man in America was a dangerous
dream to my grandparents when they were growing
up.
My parents read me this poem from Langston
Hughes: O let America be America again.
The land that never has been yet but yet must
be the land where everyone is free, the poor
man, the Indian, the Negro, me.
Who made America?
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the
rain must make our mighty dream live again?
Oh, yes, I say it plain.
America never was America to me.
But I swear this oath, America will be.
Our generation must say collectively not on
our watch.
This will not be the generation with more
people in poverty than our parents.
This will not be the generation with lower
literacy rates than our parents.
This will not be the generation where our
economy declines in comparison to the rest
of the world.
We know we have the capacity.
But as our leaders have said, there can be
no progress without struggle.
As king said, change will not roll in on the
wheels of inevitability.
It must be carried in by patriots and soldiers
for truth and justice and, I say, the American
way.
Thank you.