Category: 20th-Century History and Culture

A View from Third Base?–Historian Karen Ferguson on Cory Booker and the Legacy of Racial Liberalism

Booker’s concurrent troubles in leading Newark and success as a political celebrity demonstrate how the rise of elite black figures in America is not the culmination of the fight for racial equality, as the story is often told, but is rather the consummation of an elite white strategy begun in the late 1960s to bring exceptional African Americans into the highest echelons of American culture and society with few benefits for those left behind.