I was born in 1955, and will be forever shaped by the struggle for integration in schools, businesses, housing, and society that I read about as a child—police hoses turned on children in Birmingham, the passage of the Fair Housing Act in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other moments that were simultaneously inspiring and tragic. As an adult, I see myself as trying to carry on a version of that struggle for integration in the much less dramatic and tragic setting of two affluent suburban communities near the poor, majority black city of Newark.
Over time, I have become much more optimistic about the prospects for integration both in my community and more broadly. When my wife and I and our young children moved to our community from Newark twenty years ago this year, I saw the community as an imperiled island of integration in a sea of segregation to our east and west. When I was running real estate tests and helping to set up a pro-integrative loan program for a local pro-integration organization ten plus years ago, I worried about whether the community would be able to maintain long-term integration in the schools, and was very pessimistic about the prospects for two integrated suburbs near us that were less affluent and highly-educated than our community. Nowadays, a huge influx of people from around the world, especially Asia, Latin America, and Africa, has transformed the university in which I work, has transformed the two nearby suburbs I just mentioned, is beginning to transform my community (in which 27% of the residents with family origins in Africa were born overseas per the 2010 census), and I believe will continue to transform the place where I live and am active.
I am extremely positive about the ongoing changes in America, New Jersey, my university, nearby communities, and my own community that have made these places a magnet for people from around the world. Last year, I helped found a non-profit civic organization devoted to celebrating and promoting my community as an international one, and I remain strongly committed to that vision and to that organization, in which I serve as president.
Much as I am impressed and grateful at the rise of an open-to-the-world country and community, there are some thorny issues both at the political level—it is very important, I believe, to keep sight of the traditional integration issues involving blacks and whites in America that I grew up with—and the personal level.
It is fine, I believe, if my faith in an international present and future for my community inspires me to work harder and more effectively as a school board member and candidate for reelection this year. It is not fine at all if my official position is misused in an effort to gain benefits for my civic organization. Nor is it fine—and here the lines can be subjective and trickier to draw—if my civic activism leads me as a board member to support positions that I think are good for the cause of a global present and future in my community but that are not good for the children in the schools and the taxpayers. Governmental bodies like school boards can benefit from the energy of people like myself who have strong value-based commitments that are expressed in activism in religious groups, civic groups, and other kinds of non-government organizations. But there are rightful expectations that people in government are obliged to represent the broad public interest, not a sectarian or organizational interest, no matter how worthy the interest may be.
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