Cory Booker's Hometown--and Mine
How Harrington Park raised a Lover and a Fighter
I've been thinking a lot about Cory Booker's, and my, hometown, Harrington Park, New Jersey, which got a positive shout-out during his 25-hour long speech on the Senate floor as a place where he felt loved. A remarkable statement considering his parents, IBM engineers, had to have a white couple pose as buyers for them to even be able to secure a house there.
Harrington Park in northern New Jersey is a bedroom community of New York City. Population 4.5K-ish (both now and when Cory grew up), its median home price is today just under one million dollars. The bus stop to my high school was the same as the one to Manhattan.
"H.P.," as locals call it, is overwhelmingly white. It was no easy feat for Cory’s parents to be on the forefront of its even marginal integration. Cory has elsewhere told the story of how the Bookers became "four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream," as his father put it. The Bookers have every reason to hate their town. But Cory said last night, the place loved him up.
How is it possible that Cory could have such positive memories? Though overwhelmingly white, Harrington Park of the 1970s and 80s was liberal in the most earnest, "cringe" way possible. It was also at that time about a quarter+ Italian, a quarter+ Jewish, increasingly Korean, and the rest generic white.
Predominantly, then, Harrington Park was made up of first and second generation immigrants. I had friends who spoke only Italian when at home. These families had white flighted out of gritty, crime-ridden 1970s New York to give their children fresh air. Some people never crossed that bridge back. My father drove over it every weekday.
The heavy Jewish/Italian mix of Harrington Park meant that Cory and I were raised on the best damn pizza in the world. We were also treated to school visits by Holocaust survivors regularly. We could Never Forget.
Periodically, world events would bring a new mix of immigrants to our door. Vividly, we were joined by Iranian students fleeing the Islamic takeover of Iran. Korean families were fleeing the repression of Park Chung-hee. And sundry economic migrations increased: One of my best friends had moved from Jamaica. Another family from Mexico.
There was one other African-American family in Harrington Park beside the Bookers. I won't mention their last name, but my classmate was named Chuck. And Chuck, who dressed better than all of us, would sit quietly, earning A's and talking little while our teacher Mr. Kennedy shouted from the front of the room:
"You should be proud of your heritage, Charles!"
He did it nearly every week. It looked to me like Chuck wanted to die at such moments. Who wants to be singled out as the only Black kid in the tub of vanilla ice cream? I think his parents were also engineers. Anyway, when I say “liberal to the point of cringe”? This is what I mean.
But bear with me as I sing the praises of liberal to the point of cringe. At least Mr. Kennedy didn't chirp, "Doesn't matter if you're purple or pink or brown or white!" He didn't say it doesn't matter. He invoked history. My teachers knew their history. THEY KNEW ALL THE HISTORY.
They also taught all the history. I knew that slavery was the reason the South fought against their own government. The video Mrs. Peck showed of the Battle of Chickamauga gave me nightmares for life, but it also drove home the folly and startling expense of bigotry. That showing of Night and Fog in 7th grade? I still see skeletons being bull-dozed into pits.
I try to imagine this kind of education now, where America's flaws and the world's tribal hatreds are acknowledged and made the substance of lessons. And it's increasingly hard to imagine. Arguably, there are less traumatizing ways to teach this history. But then again, are there?
I was thinking about this listening to Booker at various points in his 25-hour speech, but especially at the end when he called for us to love America WHILE acknowledging its hard history. Again and again he admitted that he had made mistakes. He called on his fellow Democrats to admit theirs. But mainly, over and over during the day, he invoked the trauma that everyday Americans were living with, inflicted by this administration and enabled by the silence of others.
He read the letters of traumatized citizens. He did it dramatically to make us feel that trauma. He did not seek to minimize the pain and fear in those letters by reading them with intellectual or polite distance. And then he spoke from his own experience. He spoke of having to unbuckle his Dad's pants in a public restroom when his Dad had Parkinsons. He made it visceral. Undeniable.
Life is messy. America is holy crap messy. That is what I learned growing up. That is what Cory learned growing up from a group of teachers who had lived through the Kennedy assassination, McCarthyism, the disaster of the war in Vietnam. A period of American shame.
What has blown me away as I watch the last 8, 10, 12 years, as I’ve trained students to go out and teach in public schools, as I hear their stories of not even being able to assign a Langston Hughes poem without a white parent yelling in their faces—what has shocked and saddened me is how far we’ve gone away from the education that Cory Booker and I had. Students today are to be protected, coddled, catered to. No discomfort should be felt. Not ever.
For all the comfort that Harrington Park, N.J. afforded its children—and it was a *lot of comfort—it did not bring that comfort into the curriculum of our schools. Like everyone else back then we watched Schoolhouse Rock so we knew making a law was much more complicated than a president signing an executive order. But there was so much to our education than that (much as that would be a good start right now). There was palpable challenge. Palpable. Meaning they made us feel it.
I wonder how we get back to a place where this education is valued and supported by the government and parents. In his speech yesterday, Cory Booker asked us to go way, way beyond protesting this administration. He enjoined us to reach into ourselves and find our own broken hearts. To act in every single area of our communities to embrace America as it is--not the whitewashed version. To learn that what America truly is and has been, and teach it.
Thank you, Cory Booker. You did us all proud.
Beautiful. Thank you.