Newark’s Mayor Baraka Got Played On Open Space And EJ
“The warnings issued by X and King ring true today”
R – L Kelly Mooij, NJ Audubon, Newark Mayor Baraka, Ed Potasnak, NJ League of Conservation Voters, Tom Gilbert, NJ Conservation Foundation, sorry not sure of this woman’s name
I just read an excellent essay on Joe Biden, a story that I wish got published widely before the election, see:
This passage from that essay reminded me of exactly the same dynamics I have criticized certain NJ “white liberal” “environmentalists” for:
Two years before Malcolm X was assassinated, he delivered a speech skewering white liberals, “The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”
Martin Luther King Jr. would share similar sentiments on white centrists in his letter from the Birmingham jailhouse, writing, “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
The warnings issued by X and King ring true today. …
The only possible way for meaningful change to occur — not symbolic victories — is for all decent people to continuously take to the streets and, by any means necessary, demand justice and freedom.
As put by Martin Luther King Jr., “this is no time to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
As I’ve written many times, elite (largely white) NJ conservation and environmental groups cynically have used the black community as a prop in their “open space” fundraising campaigns.
They have been aided in those efforts by “black faces in high places”
That same manipulation was used in passage of the recent “environmental justice” law.
Yes, tragically, “The warnings issued by X and King ring true today.”
Nancy Fraser calls it “Progressive Neoliberalism” – where identity politics masks a corporate agenda –
Joe Biden is now the current lead practitioner and it is becoming blatantly obvious.