Cory Booker on White Supremacist Violence

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This is Radio Landic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

What you're hearing is amazing grace played on the bells of the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

I'm recording myself from the Charleston airport.

I was just there at Mother Emmanuel to hear Corey Booker give a speech on gun violence and white nationalism in the wake of this weekend's shootings.

The first time I was at this church was four years ago.

A few blocks away, I heard another rendition of Amazing Grace.

How sweet

the sound!

President Obama broke out in song at the memorial service for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, and I will tell you, I've never been to a political speech like that.

Days earlier, Pinckney and eight other members of the Mother Emmanuel congregation were murdered in the church basement by a white supremacist.

In Booker's speech there on Wednesday, he spoke about the history of racism and violence in America, how it built up to that church shooting and what's happened since, and now how that history has led to a crossroads.

People's very lives are in the balance.

And to be frank, the future of our country hangs in the balance.

The character and the culture of who we are hangs in the balance.

This is the crossroads, which is why we can't let these conversations devolve into the impotent simplicity of who is or isn't a racist.

Because if the answer to the question, do racism and white supremacy exist, is yes, then the real question isn't who is or isn't a racist, but who is and isn't doing something about it.

After a speech, I sat down with Booker.

We were in the pastor's office in the same basement.

where the shooting took place four years ago.

Here's our conversation.

Well, so let's start.

What's it like to walk in here?

It is

the challenge of both holding pain and grief in your heart at the same time that you hold

hope and inspiration.

The way this community responded to the most awful of tragedies inspires in me the best of human virtues.

But at the same time,

you just can't escape

the pain that's here, the hurt, the loss.

So

it is, in a sense, I think in many ways, what I've learned is a story of black America, is this awful wretchedness and pain and unimaginable suffering combined with

the powerful testimony of

perseverance, of faithfulness, and ultimately

the exaltation of

advancement.

That's very high-minded, but what is it it feel like for you?

Look,

it's humbling when you walk on

this church.

I really feel

a spirit that's humbled because of

not only the history of this church, which I hit on a lot,

which is amazing, extraordinary,

but the spirit of the people here.

It's very, very humbling.

Do you...

You give a speech like that, it's about half an hour, something a lot of nicely crafted sentences, references, decolations, to Martin Luther King, to Toni Morrison.

But I feel like we're in,

when it comes to this conversation about guns in America for the last bunch of years,

we give speeches, we hear speeches, we write columns,

and nothing actually changes about this.

After

Columbine, after

Newtown, after Parkland, there were a lot of people feeling really torn up and saying things on TV and giving speeches like the one you gave and the more shooting.

Was there a powerlessness to it?

No.

Look, thank God that abolitionists who worked for centuries to end slavery didn't give up.

Thank God civil rights leaders who pushed for civil rights legislation, which failed multiple times in Congress, multiple time after time after time after time.

Thank God they didn't give up.

They saw it as a challenge to bring a more creative activism, to bring

just more fight,

bigger coalitions,

more creative ways to prick the conscience of a country.

And,

you know, there were tragedies and children dying and church bombings, killings like Mississippi and Mississippi is Mississippi Burning

documented.

There were awful, awful things, but folks didn't stop fighting.

And so I think that you fail when you give up.

And I refuse to fail.

And so I think that words matter.

I think that the history of great social movements,

there are still words that inspire me today from Susan B.

Anthony saying it was we the people, not we the mugmale citizens who made this nation or

king or

heck, even Malcolm X.

I mean, there's, there's, These words help to inspire, to sustain, to nurture, to energize.

And so

all of us have a responsibility not to be silent, to keep speaking up, to keep fighting, and to keep working.

The thing that strikes me, though, is if you look in the example of even the last week or two in Puerto Rico, where over something,

nobody died in text messages that the governor,

that scandal was caught, now the corruption and all those things, maybe then say people died because of that.

But there were marches in the streets, there were demonstrations for weeks, sustaining people out there, and it forced the governor to resign.

And you don't see anything like that about anything, including guns, including racism

in

the country as a whole.

And then you see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumber saying in their statement that they said, well, you know, we should pass legislation, but we need the public to speak out on this.

Are we not seeing enough of the public speaking out?

Look, look,

I talk about this.

You've heard me talk about this, the frustration that I've I've had living 20 years in Newark.

And there's been times I've just felt broken,

and it's often been around the time that people in my community have died, and I feel like the world doesn't even take notice anymore.

And so, yeah,

it frustrates me that the compassion we are starting to see now coming from the opaque addiction wasn't there during the crack epidemic.

It frustrates me that thousands of places have

children with lead in their blood.

And we don't see that as a national crisis.

So yeah, these things frustrate me.

But that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

That's why I fight.

That's why so many other people do.

But would it take people in the streets to make a change?

It strikes me that there is a level of acceptance, and maybe some would call it complicity in the situation being what it is, because we accept it.

We don't

in Puerto Rico, they marched.

They said they wanted the governor gone.

He's gone.

They don't even know who the governor is now.

That's how chaotic that situation is.

But here, it's like it has become routine.

Oh, another shooting.

Even over the weekend,

I think people

who went to sleep on Saturday knowing about the El Paso news and then woke up to the Dayton news.

Even that could be like, wow, that's a lot, but it's another shooting.

Look,

so much of the speech I just gave was about this idea that there's no neutrality in this.

that you either are contributing to the problems by being

apathetic by inaction, or you are contributing to the solutions by being an activist.

And all of us have to do that.

And so

much of my work is trying to

get that...

a more activist empathy going.

But remember, there's lots of different pathways to progress.

And in some ways, marching in the streets works sometimes.

In some ways, it's, you know, I've seen progress for

LGBTQ rights that came about through a multiple set of strategies as that struggle continues, frankly.

So I'm not, I do believe we have a problem of, as I said, of too much tolerance for injustice.

And that ultimately we need to find ways

to activate more people to understand that we may not see it evident to us,

but injustice is undermining our sense of justice, that insecurity,

physical insecurity, financial insecurity, it's weakening the whole.

And that's so much of what

the leaders I respect always tried to do is to help people understand, like I said in my words earlier this morning, that we are all in this together, that we all are obligated to realize that, as King said more eloquently than me, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The stat that I cited for the weekend also is that in Chicago, 48 people were shot.

I think it was five killed.

And that's, if you were talking about your experience in Newark, that's familiar, obviously, on a bigger scale.

Chicago's a bigger city than Newark.

But that that is not a completely out-of-the-normal weekend in Chicago at this point or in different scales in different cities in America.

And we don't think about that.

Is that part of the problem too?

Absolutely.

I think it's a symptom of what I was talking about there, which is that certain lives don't matter.

That the value is less.

That we don't have to care about this tragedy.

And I think that that's insidious.

It's been a long time since we've seen the majority of homicides in this country being African Americans.

And the fact that that hasn't gotten us all to understand we need to do something about guns is problematic.

And that's why I'm grateful for the larger coalitions in our society that are starting to exist between Parkland students and Chicago students that are starting to understand: wait a minute, this horror will never stay contained.

If we don't deal with the scourge of gun violence, it's going to ripple into all communities, just like the problems of trying to stigmatize addiction in this country

that is now rolling across America in ways that are truly epidemic.

So again, it is very problematic that the deaths of black children in inner cities isn't dominating our consciousness.

But I'm beginning to see more people being aware of that

and that in many ways are seeds of hope within that consciousness to the hurt and the harm and the pain

of so many other communities of America.

What are seeds of hope?

That seems like a very Corey Booker type expression.

Because I wonder, you talk about love, you talk about radical love, seeds of hope.

I think that there is a lot of despondency.

No, but look, it's not.

It's the seeds of hope when Dorothea Cotton and James Bevel could create a children's march in Birmingham that awakens suburban folks to say, wait a minute, this is horrors that are going on and activate their engagement.

It's a seed of hope when

I tweeted about the Shahad Smith's murder and a Parkland student who's in his ascendancy of social media following retweets me and said and demands that this is an issue for us too.

That's a story that I've heard you tell that Shahad Smith, please explain what that is.

Shahad Smith was a guy that died,

was murdered with an assault rifle at the top of the block that I live in.

Yeah.

And you feel like that's bringing everything together.

That there is...

I mean,

are we on a downward spiral?

Are we on an upward spiral?

And is it just

naivete

maybe to say that we're on an upward spiral, that it's not too late?

Or are we on...

I'm just saying when Americans of different background, different race, different religions, different geographies, begin to have deeper understanding of the suffering and the pain of other Americans of different background, different geography, different race, That that's strength.

It's just what it is.

And

most of the great changes we've seen have come from

multi-racial ethnic coalitions.

And so the more that people understand that they have common cause, whether it's people in suburban towns and people in your city towns, that the scourge of gun violence isn't affecting the other, but it's affecting the whole.

That gives more hope.

It makes change more possible.

Can you talk about that for a minute?

You, as mayor, met with families who

are victims of gun violence.

What does it do to a family?

What is that when you walk in the door of a family that has had

a son or a daughter or an uncle or mother or father shot?

They're wounds that just don't heal, and I don't think people understand.

First of all,

the devastation to a family, to the trauma.

And we now know from studies that the economic hardship,

the

cost

to

a family endure for years and years and years, and the costs are both financial,

health,

overall well-being, it shatters and its reach goes far.

But the same thing with community.

I always try to tell people about a murder that happened in front of an IHOP IHOP in Newark under my leadership and how

it so shattered that community.

Not only the families directly impacted, but that business then suddenly had to, nobody wanted to come for the late night hours, so it stopped from being a 24-hour thing, so they cut the third shift.

Well, that then affected the financial livelihoods of a whole bunch of people that really needed those jobs and those extra shifts to support their family.

So suddenly one shooting now is rippling out and affecting hundreds and hundreds of people in our community.

And so that's just one shooting.

These are happening hundreds and hundreds of these every single day.

And we seem to tell stories and our attention doesn't hold to the fact that someone who has a one gunshot wound could have a path of recovery that lasts decades, that could leave them paralyzed.

I can't tell you how chilling it is in Newark to see young men in wheelchairs who won't walk again because they are so-called wounded.

And we almost have this mentality where we minimize that pain and that damage.

We don't understand that, I mean, just the financial costs for this country.

I asked an emergency room worker, how much does it, the hospital bills of people who are shot, who often end up showing up without insurance, how much does that cost society, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I mean,

all of this,

we do not fully account for how this is harming our society, harming people, harming communities, harming our economy,

the trauma that is ingrained, it's almost generational trauma

of such violence and such loss.

And

how it affects the mental health of individuals and the mental health of a nation that now has a deeper fear

that penetrates the toxicity of that fear that's in our body politic now.

That I go around and have children.

And this is countless now, countless town halls I have where children stand up and speak of their fear.

What does that do when you have, and that literally, you know, this is like that fear is starting to release brain chemicals that affect our overall mental health and our well-being and our ability to learn and

develop.

So

this is a crisis that I don't think we speak to enough, especially understanding that why aren't we making the changes?

They're kind of obvious to every other nation.

And this is what like incenses me about a president that wants to point to things like video games and mental health.

When other countries have the same video games or worse,

other countries have struggled with mental health as well.

But clearly, we have a different problem that's resulting because of the ease of access to guns.

I mean, you play video games, right?

I mean, have you ever played a video game where that's been a shooter game?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And to think when you are not a person who...

Have you ever picked up a gun?

Yes.

But you have not gone on a shooting ramp.

No.

I mean, look,

it is

a purposeful

of politics for a politician to stand up and try to distract us from the root causes

of our problems.

This is what Donald Trump has done in a time of national crisis where we needed truth-telling.

He tries to distract us,

literally pulling from the language of the very people, the corporate gun lobby, the NRA, who are trying to distract us from what the real solution to this problem is, which is to take the common sense steps to keep guns out of the hands of those who seek to do violent crimes.

And a president who seems to have no,

clearly he has no sense of shame, but no recognition that he is contributing to the rise of hate in this country, that he is actually using it for his own political benefit.

He is whipping it up.

He is encouraging it.

He's encouraging mob-like behavior from going from telling people to punch somebody in the face, I'll pay your legal bills, all the way to now jeering and chanting of other Americans, people of color, to go home.

We're going to take a short break, but we'll have more with Senator Corey Booker in a moment.

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The argument about one of the counterarguments to this would be that with Dayton, the shooter there, it's not even that he tweeted things about Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

It's that that doesn't seem like it was a politically motivated

shooting that had other motives there.

But that was a mass shooting within, whatever it was, 16 hours of a mass shooting in El Paso.

So

part of the response to this could be, well, I mean, why is this about the political rhetoric?

Why is this about Donald Trump?

If shootings are happening nonetheless.

It is all has a political root.

And it's

if

we are using politics

and hatred and demagoguery and fear-mongering

to stop common sense actions to protect ourselves and our country.

I see this in the NRA literature.

Oh, they're coming for our guns.

Nothing,

I have what is said to be the boldest gun safety plan of all the Democratic candidates, and none of that involves taking guns away from law-abiding citizens.

And so these tired

lies

that are being used to undermine what would make every place from Chicago to El Paso safer.

That's the most horrible, hateful

politics that allows violence to proliferate.

And it's disgusting.

And you talked about the fear that's permeating.

It also seems to me the numbness that comes from this, from like I was saying, another mass shooting.

And so I wonder I asked you about going to meet with victims' families.

What do you say to them?

How are you not...

How many of those did you do?

I would assume dozens at least, right?

I've been to so many vigils, so many funerals,

talked to so many families, so many survivors, so many wounded.

And what do you say?

You don't, it's your words don't matter.

It's your heart and your spirit in moments like that.

It's like

there are no words

that work.

They just don't.

There's nothing, no word that can replace the loss of a loved one or that can

truly address

the harm.

It just can't be done.

And people are...

you know, people want this to stop, the nightmare to stop.

And the power of these survivors now and you see them all across our country who make the purpose of their lives I still remember early in the campaign I'm in I'm in I'm in northern New Hampshire and a couple drives hours from Maine to see me just to tell me that their child was murdered and and

they've made their cause that they've turned their pain into their purpose that they now live to try to stop this from happening to other families and so

you know that's what's sitting in this church now.

This church,

the mission of this church still seems to be to

try to end this nightmare.

So, you know, I have been an adequate emissary

of comfort in times like this because there's no comfort in a community where kids hear

gunshot, fireworks on the 4th of July when we should be celebrating freedom.

And we're not.

People are not celebrating freedom because they're not free from fear.

Those fireworks sound like

gunshots and you have parents, these awful stories where parents tell you about children who are evidencing post-traumatic stress, anxiety, literally kids hiding when they, or ducking for cover when they hear a firework.

And so this is a,

this is, we are in a distraught present.

And again, it comes back to,

you know, what you criticize me or that I'm, you know, but I, you know, I'm a prisoner of of hope I just am I was just pointing out it was a Corey Booker phrase

but my point is is that

the person who taught me this was a survivor Miss Jones the tenant president for the projects I live in whose son was murdered in the lobby I mean it's just this horror but yet she was this defiant woman who didn't leave that community and I was actually confused by that and I had to ask her because I know where she works she works worked in the prosecutor's office she made good money she she didn't have to live in these

frankly it was the hardest place i've ever lived these dilapidated housing projects that had no heat no hot water and were surrounded by violence and and her reaction to me of why she still stays here was almost just like why you asked me this stupid question guy

because i stay here because she joked i'm in charge of homeland security like that was it was comical but it was just like yeah you're right this is your purpose and and and that's why i always say that she taught me that the definition of hope that I cling to is that hope is the active conviction that despair won't have the last word.

Our history is full of a wretchedness that we try to cover up.

This summer is a century since some of the worst racial terror we have ever seen in cities all across America.

Bands of white supremacists were

pulling blacks off streetcars and beating them to death, burning black businesses and black homes.

Like most Americans aren't even conscious of the thousands and thousands of African Americans that were beaten, lynched, murdered, maimed, all the way up into the 1960s.

And then this hatred was enshrined in laws that literally my family had to fight a physical contest just to buy the house I grew up in.

This is part of our history, but the wretchedness that we have in our history is outmatched by people who never surrendered to it and fought by people of different races that found common cause, who did the great leap of empathy to say, you don't have to struggle alone, that this is a threat to America.

And so

we are in a moment no less dire than my ancestors and our ancestors faced.

And yet they found a way to better this country.

And so I think that truth-telling is really important because to paper over that truth diminishes the greatness of this country.

And this idea that we're going to create some Disney movie type version of our history is offensive to me.

It diminishes who we are.

By not telling the truth of our past

is an insult.

and an injury to the present and our ability to grapple with wretchedness, violence, and pain.

And so knowing the bloody, violent truth of our past empowers me and encourages my hope for what we have the capacity to do in our present.

But it's not easy.

It is not.

What is easy is what Donald Trump does, is for short-term, pitiful political gain to demonize the other.

other Americans, to demean and degrade them.

This is

as much a part of the American story, politicians like this.

this is a major part of our American political story.

And so I have no choice but to stay in this fight.

And even if you lose day after day, I have to go to a funeral after funeral after funeral, even if you lock, as I did lock myself in my mayor's office from time to time and just cry.

You've got to get up off your knees and go back into the fight.

That's what this moment calls for.

And none of us can show greater courage than those people in our past who saw more wretchedness, more violence, more hurt, more pain, but kept on going, kept on fighting,

and bequeathed to us a nation that was better than when they found it.

And that's what this moment in American history is.

We'll close with this.

You said in your speech you weren't there because you were asking for a vote, but you are in South Carolina because you were campaigning.

You were running for president.

You're going to be in Iowa this weekend.

This is a campaign.

It's a campaign in which you,

through your career also, but in the campaign, you've talked about gun violence, what to do about it.

You've talked about unifying, about love, and taking a different path.

And

a line that you used in the speech about

how loving the country means loving everybody in the country.

You say it a little bit more eloquently than I just did it.

You had a good moment in the debate last week in Detroit.

But for the most part, the race is

the top tier of the race, whatever hasn't been there.

We're not going to talk about Poland because I know that that's not a topic that you love.

But does it feel like now with these things coming together that

you're finding more of the purpose for your run?

And you're an ambitious politician, as everybody in the race is.

You all want to be president of the United States.

But does it seem like there's something maybe more that is being revealed in these moments about why you want to be in the race?

No, it's reaffirmed what I said at the very beginning of this campaign, is I am running because of the forces trying to rip our country apart.

I'm running because I believe we need a president that could heal and bring people together.

That's literally been

the language I've used from the beginning of this campaign.

And I've always known that the antidote to Trump's demeaning and degrading and divisiveness is the next leader needs to be one that has the

driving purpose to be unifying, healing, and speaking openly about civic grace and decency and love.

And that's why I got in this, that's the principal reason I got into this race.

Look, I will put my policy ideas and my plans next to anyone.

But look, I can't honestly sit here and tell you I remember the differences between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama's health care policy.

I'm sure they could tell you.

Right, right.

But they debated it vigorously.

But I can tell you that Obama spoke to my heart and he spoke to my gut and he spoke to my spirit.

I talked to the head of the party in New Hampshire and said, after Nixon, Carter came to New Hampshire and talked of grace and an antidote to

what hurt a country and spoke to the national yearning for someone that could try to bring us together.

I think Clinton spoke openly about the best of American virtues.

And so I think that this is a moral moment.

I think that this is, as I say, on the campaign trail.

This is not a referendum on one guy in one office.

This is a referendum.

This election will be a a referendum on who we are and who we must be to each other.

It's a referendum on the very culture of our country

and what are the values we most stand for.

I had a Republican in an airport come up to me and say to me, astonishingly, I disagree with Donald Trump's tweets and his meanness and whatever, but I really think he's doing great things for the economy.

And that basically is someone saying to me that your financial concerns are trumping your values of decency and kindness and grace.

And that, to me,

in a sense, captures the moral choice of this moment.

What do you say to that person?

How do you make that person into a Corey Booker voter or even a Democratic vote?

Well, I was late for the plane, so I didn't have time to get into it.

Actually, if I have to be honest, I was trying to get something to eat and then

get to my plane.

Look.

This is the conversation of my campaign.

I am telling even Democratic voters, and you've heard me use this line: that I'm not running with the simplistic ambition to beat Republicans.

I'm running to be a leader that can unite Americans and create new American majorities that are even bigger than party.

So you've heard me say that.

And I'm not sure if you'll get everybody, but I think that we can get back to a point in this country where we can pull together an American decency that can overcome those who are trying to drive us into depravity.

All right.

Well, now you have another plane to get to, and so do I.

Okay.

Corey Booker, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you very much.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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