Cory Booker: “thank you very much for the recognition. I think--I am not sure, but I think I am the only Senator here who lives in a…”

“thank you very much for the recognition. I think--I am not sure, but I think I am the only Senator here who lives in a low-income, Black and Brown community in the U.S. Senate. I live in a beautiful neighborhood in the beautiful Central Ward of Newark, NJ. We don't mistake wealth with worth. In fact, I went off to get a fancy education. I may have gotten my B.A. from Stanford, but I got my Ph.D. on the streets of Newark, learning from some of the most incredible people I have ever encountered in my life. If there is one lesson that I have learned early in my days, in the 1990s, living in the Central Ward of Newark at the height of the drug war, it is that this War on Drugs was not a War on Drugs; it was a war on people--and not all people but certain people. It was a war on poor people. It was a war on Black people. And it was destroying lives. People were getting criminal convictions for doing things that two of the last four Presidents admitted to doing--simple possession, getting criminal convictions for it. And here is what is even more anguishing at a time in the opioid addiction where everybody now is on the same page that people who are addicted deserve to have treatment. Back in those days, churned into the criminal justice system were African Americans, for simple possession, who were in desperate need of compassion and care and love and treatment. And this gets me to Vanita Gupta.…”