“If you can feed them, you can lead them.” This is the political culture of Newark, New Jersey – a city with staggeringly high poverty and murder rates. Marshall Curry’s Street Fight documents the intersection of race, identity, and democracy in the city’s 2002 mayoral elections. In this city, elections are won and lost in the streets.

The race was between Sharpe James, a powerful and sketchy incumbent, and Corey Booker, an all-American, Ivy League-educated rookie. I label James as ‘sketchy’, because of the tactics he used. Supporters of Booker were threatened. Businesses that hung Booker’s posters were dissuaded by promises of code enforcement shutdowns. Accusations about Booker being white, Republican, Jewish, and associated with the Ku Klux Klan were made. Basically, he played dirty.

One of my favorite scenes from Curry’s documentary was of Corey Booker wearing a Stanford Football Rose Bowl shirt in his Brick Towers apartment. Interestingly, Booker’s academic success was one of the main ‘issues’ James slandered.

Why? Because, the way James saw it, an educated black man is essentially white. This belief represents a problem seen all too often in American society- that being an educated minority is misconstrued as cultural abandonment. Phrases like, “you talk so white” and “you’re not really black” are quintessential examples that too many have heard. Academic success should not lead to hardships in cultural identification.

It is a frustrating idea, and I would like to thank Marshall Curry for documenting a story that transcends beyond the corruption of politics and sheds a raw light on the judgments minorities with academic accomplishments sometimes face.