A key number for understanding the election as mayor of Newark of black nationalist Ras Baraka (son of Sixties poet Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka) over Cory Booker's well-funded designated successor is 10.9. That's the number of miles from downtown Newark to Wall Street. Another number is 18: that's the number of minutes from Newark's Penn Station to New York's Penn Station.
In an age of gentrification, electing a hostile mayor like Baraka is intended to scare off potential gentrifiers.
Fine with me. Keep 'em where they are.
ReplyDeleteWish Oakland would adopt the same tactic.
Yes, no reason not to maintain the status quo in Newark.
ReplyDeleteIntended? The election result is the product of crude race hate, not attributable to a plan intended to bring about a particular result. You give the voters of Newark too much credit.
ReplyDeleteNewark has an ugly, ugly reputation.
ReplyDeleteThe waterfront and the border area with Jersey City scare the hell out of me. I rode my Harley along the waterfront at high noon one day, because I always have to see for myself.
War zone. Security personnel are packing heaving weapons, and flashing the weapons for emphasis.
The housing stock is ugly as hell in most of the city. I have no idea what's under the aluminum siding job everybody bought in the 50s and 60s. Bombed out scenes from the 67 race riot still exist.
Newark isn't just black gang hell, either. MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadoran gang) seems to have claimed some turf. Sadistic violent crimes are common.
What I'm saying is, Newark is a good place to get your white ass killed. Gentrify at your own peril!
Shavar Jeffries, the guy Baraka beat, was in my class at Duke. He was president of the Black Student alliance and was known for making demands that the university hire more black professors. It has been absolutely hilarious to see Jeffries position himself as the mainstream, Wall Street-backed candidate in this race.
ReplyDeleteNewark was the car-jacking capital of the world in the 90s...
ReplyDeleteBaraka defeated the former assistant state attorney general Shavar Jeffries, winning fifty-four per cent of the vote to Jeffries’s forty-six. Jeffries, who was twenty-three points behind only six weeks ago, rose quickly in the polls in the campaign’s final month. He was helped by $2.1 million in contributions from Education Reform Now, the political-financing arm of Democrats for Education Reform, a group founded by Wall Street financial executives who champion charter schools to support campaigns that back school reforms of the sort that are opposed by teachers’ unions. President Barack Obama and Booker were among their beneficiaries.
ReplyDeleteThat tells you a lot right there.
The Newark mayoral election may be the first successful counterattack of World War G. It will be interesting to see how far and fast Baraka presses the gentrifiers. At this point can Baraka mobilize his street army to roll back gentrification?
ReplyDeleteGood point Steve, here in NJ, somehow this ghetto black guy was able to "raise" enough money to clog up the radio stations with advertisements in the previous week. I'm not just talking about hip-hop radio, but I heard his ads on top 40 and talk radio, along with a ton of obnoxious donald sterling type billboards in the city of Newark and the surrounding counties. Something fishy is going on with all this money spent.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the name "Baraka" was reminiscent of "Barak" and this could have been a 2nd or 3rd cousin of the president, or perhaps another lost half-brother. This name similarity may have been a key point in mobilizing an army of for the most part illiterates to vote.
My impression is that Newark isn't really in danger of gentrifying. A key fact is that after the riots in the 60s, the city razed a lot of the older housing stock and industrial buildings and built new, cheaper, ugly housing in their place. So Newark destroyed its supply of dilapidated fixer-uppers for whites to buy on the cheap and renovate.
ReplyDeleteAnother Sailer theme goes mainstream:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/19/pruden-running-out-of-white-folks/
I still can't get over that Imamu Amiri Baraka was chosen to be New Jersey's poet laureate back in the '90s. The same guy who wrote the obscenity laden "preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note." Do they not vet these people.
ReplyDelete(Of course, N.J. almost made Springsteen's "Born to Run" the state song, before they realized it was about getting out of NJ.)
"Another number is 18: that's the number of minutes from Newark's Penn Station to New York's Penn Station."
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not Newark's Penn Station is beautiful, and in a not bad area. It's right at the tip of the Ironbound district, a colorful and vibrant (in the genuine sense of the words) Portuguese neighborhood.
There are also still very rich sections of Newark near Branch Brook Park, designed by Olmsted.
I just don't understand why the Portuguese, and the whites who live in the Branch Brook area don't get together to take over the city. I really don't. But I don't know Newark well. Perhaps the Branch Brook whites don't live in Newark proper. The people I feel sorry for are the Ironbound Portuguese, who are shackled to this disgusting political machine.
Good point.
ReplyDeleteBTW - I seem to recall from an old 80s book, Common Ground, that integration of schools wasn't particularly favored by blacks as much as Northern SWPLs. When I was bused in the 70s to a black school I don't recall the black kids being thrilled to see the white kids. In fact, I don't recall the black kids being thrilled about much of anything that happened in that school.
The #2 city (by population) in NJ, Jersey City is gentrifying rapidly. Former no-go neighborhoods are becoming much more white and asian. Property is just too expensive for many in the fully gentrified downtown.
ReplyDeleteIf it wasn't for rent control and Section 8 subsidies, the mid sized apartments would be bought, renovated, and rented out at market rates. Without subsidies, the black population in Jersey City would drop into the single digits (percentage) within a few years.
I temped in Jersey City for a couple days recently and it was really nice. I live in the city, so I clocked the commute back to Times Square. It was 19 minutes from the Journal Square PATH station. I don't blame people from gentrifying it. I live in Queens and it's a longer commute.
DeleteTime to call in Ras Al Ghul ...
ReplyDeleteLOL XD
DeleteIt will be interesting to watch whether a federal judge in say Arkansas, Idaho, or Oregon rules his election to be unconstitutional.
ReplyDeleteI predict he'll be about as successful as Chokwe Lumumba down in Mississippi.
ReplyDeleteOr Kwame Kilpatrick.
Ras Baraka was a city council member and a principal of one of the public high schools in Newark before he ran for and won Mayor, and he was a critic of the Zuckerberg-Booker-Christie plans for the Newark schools.
ReplyDeleteI take his election win like I take the Gray victory over Adrian Fenty a few years ago in D.C., a public repudiation on the part of black voters against the SWPL left's "Waiting for Superman" educational schemes, or rather, the teachers' unions striking back against that empire.
My maternal grandfather was approached by the Republican party to run for mayor of Newark back in the late 50's or early 60's. He turned down the offer because it would have been a very bad move for the Newark based company he ran because they did most of their business with various cities and counties that almost all were run by Democratic machines. Both he and my mother are gone now but I cannot but help think that he did not want to deal with the racial mess Newark had become. My mom had been in private schools since the 1930's.
ReplyDeleteI drove through Newark one hot Summer night back in 2010 purely out of curiosity. It was the worst urban hellhole I've ever seen this side of Bronx in the late 1970's.
ReplyDeleteGentrification is proceeding apace along the PATH train, which runs to Hoboken and also through Jersey City on the way to Newark. Hoboken is mostly yuppies and Jersey City has recently turned hipster/SWPL. There's a few stops on the PATH between Jersey City and Newark that will probably be gentrified before Newark, but Newark's Penn Station is only a half hour train ride from the new World Trade Center. Give it a decade or two.
ReplyDeleteIronbound is pretty safe. Great restaurants.
ReplyDeleteSo DPG,
ReplyDeleteWhat's the explanation for my question? Are the rich whites in the Branch Brook area not eligible to vote in Newark elections?
To whoever said it was the worst slum he'd ever seen, you only saw one part.
Newark is weird as hell. Ironbound is a pleasure to walk in. Walk down its main drag, Ferry St., to Penn Station, then turn right on this big street whose name I forget, walk about 15 minutes and you are in a huge pedestrian mall type area, where the old Bamberger's used to be.
The building stands there in forlorn magnificence. The crowds are 85% black, 14% Hispanic, and the odd white tourist.
The feeling is hostile & creepy, the exact opposite of the pleasant ambience of Ironbound.
A little Newark history:
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/l95p46s
Where is Bams? Gone with the wind, like Tara!
I saw 'Dutchman' the play by LeRoi Jones in Washington DC around 1962 or 63. I can't remember the theater. He was, I believe the first black man who prospered, as a rabid hater. He hated whites, he hated gays, he hated Jews. I'm sure if you met him he would have hated you too. He cast a wide net.
ReplyDeleteSomehow all that hatred kept him employed for most of his life.
I just looked him up in Wikipedia. It looks like he was following me (creepy notion). He went to San Francisco State in 1967 when I was there. But I don't remember seeing or hearing of him. He later moved to Oakland as I had, but again I don't remember anything much about him in the local news.
In the sixties on the East Coast being an angry black man was enough to get you noticed. But on the West Coast a few years later he was just another black hater amongst the multitudes of them.
Pat Boyle
I dont see Newark gentrifying because the undesirables need to live somewhere, and the wealthy suburbs sure aint interested.
ReplyDelete