Cory Booker Jumped on a Table and Lectured Black Content Creators — Then He Tried to Make Sudan a Shield. I Was There.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.May 8, 2024: The Day the Cory Booker Beef Got PersonalI want to take y’all back. All the way back. Because folks be acting like my critique of Cory Booker started yesterday, started when he climbed up on the Senate floor for 25 hours, started when the AIPAC numbers dropped, started when he was the lone Democrat to confirm Charles Kushner. Nah. My beef with Cory Booker has a birthday. May 8, 2024. Washington, D.C. A content creator and influencer summit where over a hundred of us got flown in to talk about advocacy and education in the current climate. That’s the day. That’s the room. That’s where it stopped being a policy disagreement and became personal. Let me explain why, and let me walk y’all through every step of the two years that followed, because Research over MeSearch is the standard and the receipts have been receipt-ing this whole time.Picture the scene. A senator who is a sitting United States senator, a man who has run for president once already and is clearly running again, gets invited to address a room full of content creators — the same content creators his caucus wants to mobilize, the same ones his administration’s pollsters told him he needs, the same ones who have been documenting genocide on a phone faster than the New York Times can edit a headline. And what does he do? He jumps up on a table. Tom Cruise on Oprah, you feel me. A whole ass move. Theatrical. Performative. The body language of a man who thinks he’s about to give a TED Talk to an audience that already knows the punchline.He starts talking about the significance of new media. He starts talking about how he was born and raised on grassroots movement organizing. He starts talking about how he comes from a background of social justice. The man who voted to ban TikTok stood on a table at a content creator conference and lectured us about new media. Let that marinate. The man who has taken over $700,000 from AIPAC stood in a room full of Black and Brown content creators who had spent the previous seven months documenting white phosphorus from Alabama raining on the children of Rafa, and he tried to tell us where new media came from. Shidd. We knew where new media came from. We were new media. The whole room was new media. We were what he was supposed to be listening to, and instead he was pissing on us telling us it was raining.Then came the questions. And this is where it got personal for me. Because the question that got asked — by a Black woman content creator who had read the bill, who had quoted the bill, who had named the specific provisions — was simple. Are you willing to call for a ceasefire? That was the question. Not a gotcha. Not a setup. A direct, material question about the position of a sitting United States senator on a sitting genocide. And what did Cory Booker do? He pulled out the tired playbook. He shucked and jobbed. He said, “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill.”I’m sorry you don’t understand. To a Black woman. Who had read the bill. Who had cited the bill. Who knew more about the supplemental appropriation than half the senators on his committee.That right there is misogynoir wearing a Senate pin. That right there is what Moya Bailey told us this was going to look like in the era of Black women asking questions in rooms full of cameras. That right there is what Patricia Hill Collins called controlling images deployed as political technology. That right there is what Combahee told us in 1977 — that the convergence of race, gender, and class violence does not require a hood and a rope, that it shows up in a Senate office, that it shows up in a paternalistic dismissal at a content creator summit on May 8, 2024. And let me tell you, Indigenous and Black feminist thought reads that move the same way. White feminism has historically wanted to make this a story about a man being rude. Intersectional analysis tells us that the rudeness was the form, the content was the function — silencing a Black woman who had material expertise on a question of empire because the senator did not want to answer the question she asked.She didn’t fold. She named Rafa. She named the 600,000 children. She named the white phosphorus. She named the funding pipeline. And what she got back was, “you keep defending Hamas, you would literally just be representing them.” That move is also a technology, y’all. Equating a question about a ceasefire with defense of a terrorist organization. The same equation that got cooked up in the State Department and reheated on cable news and served back at her by a sitting United States senator at a Black creators conference. I’m sorry, that ain’t an answer. That’s a deflection wrapped in a smear.And then he tried to make Sudan a shield. He said he voted for the supplemental because of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Cory. My brother. Sudan, where 17.1 million women and girls need aid in 2026. Sudan, whose UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Sudan, where Black African Muslim women in Darfur are being raped as a deliberate tactic of war. You want to talk about Sudan? Where is the smoke for Sudan in your voting record? Where is the supplemental for Sudan? Where is the 25-hour speech for Sudan? Don’t weaponize Sudanese women’s suffering to dodge a question about Rafa. Black African lives matter when they are useful as a rhetorical shield, and that’s the whole problem with the way liberal politicians talk about Sudan. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.That was May 8, 2024. That was day one for me. Let me tell y’all what happened next.A MF THREAD: THE TWO-YEAR TIMELINEMay 8, 2024. D.C. Creator Summit. Booker climbs the table. Booker dismisses a Black woman creator. Booker says, “you don’t understand the bill.” Booker weaponizes Sudan. I leave that room knowing I am going to be on this man’s case for the rest of his political career. Day one.July 24, 2024. Booker is photographed with Benjamin Netanyahu during the prime minister’s address to a joint session of Congress. The ICC has already moved on arrest warrants. Booker poses anyway. The photo will haunt him for the next two years and he will spend every public appearance after that refusing to call Netanyahu a war criminal. The man literally cannot say the words out loud.August 2024. The Democratic National Convention. No Palestinian speaker. Booker goes on CNN’s State of the Union and defends the decision, says Kamala Harris is “anguished” over the conflict. Eight months into a documented genocide and the senator wants me to feel his vice president’s feelings. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.November 2024. Trump wins. The same supplemental Booker voted for, the same posture Booker held, the same equivocation Booker performed, contributes to the depressed Black, Arab, and young voter turnout that delivers the second Trump administration. The “lesser of two evils” math does not work when the lesser evil is also handing the keys to the greater one.January–February 2025. Trump cabinet confirmation votes. Booker votes to confirm Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Booker votes to confirm John Ratcliffe for CIA Director. Booker votes to confirm Scott Bessent for Treasury. Booker votes to confirm Brooke Rollins for Agriculture. The man who would later filibuster for 25 hours had already handed Trump his cabinet.March 31 – April 1, 2025. The 25-hour Senate speech. Twenty-five hours and five minutes. Breaks Strom Thurmond’s segregationist filibuster record. Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. The same night the speech ends, Whitaker is confirmed 52-45. The standing ovation was for the performance. The legislation walked past him. I called it political theater on day one.May 20, 2025. Booker becomes the LONE Democratic yes on Charles Kushner as ambassador to France. The lone yes. Trump’s son-in-law’s daddy. The man Booker had spent 25 hours of empty floor time supposedly opposing. Where is the smoke? Yealp.June 2025. Booker votes to confirm David Perdue as ambassador to China. Mid-trade war. Mid-tariff chaos. Mid-China-hawk hysteria. Booker hands Trump his Beijing pick.Summer 2025. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislative package — passes by one vote. Three Democrats had died in office before the vote. Their seats had gone to Republicans. The same Senate where Booker filibustered to nothing. Performance is not legislation, kinfolks.October 14, 2025. Booker on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. Jennifer Welch asks if he considers Netanyahu a war criminal. Booker refuses to answer. Pivots. Says he is “not going to be outside of the room screaming.” Brother, you spent 25 hours screaming inside the room and accomplished nothing. The screaming wasn’t the problem. The strategy was.October 16, 2025. Sludge breaks the story: Booker has taken his first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in the Senate. Total haul approaches $877,000 across the cycle when the receipts are added up. The man whose past leaked tapes had him “text messaging back and forth like teenagers” with the AIPAC president now claims a public posture of restraint while pocketing the largest single-issue check of his career.March 2026. Booker tells Meet the Press he is “definitely not ruling out” a 2028 run. He releases a memoir, Stand. He claims he will refuse single-issue PAC money going forward. The conversion narrative arrives right on time for the primary. Two things can be true: he was on the AIPAC payroll, and he is laundering that history in time for Iowa. I’m not lost in the sauce on this one.April–May 2026. I write the Booker pieces. I document the 25-hour speech and what it didn’t pass. I document the Kushner confirmation. I document the AIPAC pipeline. I document the Meet the Press conversion. And I tie every single one back to where this beef started: a Black woman in a room in D.C., a senator on a table, a question about Rafa, a deflection wrapped in Sudan.That’s the timeline. That is two years of receipts. Every accusation he’s made about me being unfair, every aide who has told my mutuals that I’m being too harsh, every “but he had a good speech though” comment — every one of those moments traces back to a single question I keep asking. Where is the smoke, Cory? Where is the smoke?The Black Liberal vs. The Black Leftist on This QuestionA lot of folks want to treat this like Black-on-Black conflict. It is not. This is a distinction the Black radical tradition has been making since SNCC, since Ella Baker, since the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Richmond in 1937, since Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, since the Combahee River Collective. There is a difference between a Black liberal and a Black leftist. Cory Booker is a Black liberal. I am a Black leftist. The Black liberal believes the system can be reformed and that a seat at the table is the goal. The Black leftist believes the table itself is the problem. The Black liberal will jump up on the table at a content creator conference. The Black leftist asks whose table is it, who built it, who is being eaten on top of it.This is not a war. This is strategy. Cedric Robinson taught us that racial capitalism is not an aberration of an otherwise functional system — it is the engine of surplus value extraction itself. Frank Wilderson reminds us that gratuitous violence against Black flesh is constitutive, not incidental. Walter Rodney taught us how the same diplomatic posture that calls a ceasefire “antisemitic” abroad funds the police that occupy our neighborhoods at home. Angela Davis named Ferguson and Palestine in the same breath because the materials are the same — tear gas from the same companies, training from the same institutions, surveillance from the same vendors. The Black liberal will tell you these are separate fights. The Black leftist will show you the receipts proving they are one fight.And here is the thing about the South, which is where I come from and where I do my work — Booker’s brand of liberal politics tends to pathologize the South. The Black creators he was dismissing on May 8, 2024 included a lot of Southerners. A lot of folks from Houston, from Atlanta, from Memphis, from New Orleans, from Bryan TX. We come from the soil where Black radical organizing was born. Houston had a Black Panther chapter. So did Dallas. So did Memphis. So did NOLA. Black Workers for Justice came out of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1982. The Southern Negro Youth Congress was a Richmond institution. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm was a Mississippi cooperative. Late MLK was a leftist. Huey Newton was from Monroe, Louisiana. When a coastal liberal walks into a room full of Southern content creators and tells us we don’t understand the bill, the disrespect lands on top of three generations of organizing that built the politics he is now performing. We are not lost in the sauce. We are the sauce.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Where We Go From HereSo here is what I’m asking. When the 2028 primary comes — and it is coming — I want y’all to remember May 8, 2024. I want y’all to remember the table. I want y’all to remember the Black woman who asked the question and the senator who told her she didn’t understand. I want y’all to remember the Kushner vote. I want y’all to remember the 25-hour speech that passed zero bills. I want y’all to remember the $877,000. I want y’all to remember that this is what political theater looks like when it costs us nothing to perform and costs the rest of the world everything to absorb.Research over MeSearch. The receipts are not vibes. The receipts are votes. And the votes are on the record. Education is elevation, kinfolks. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise — I will be on this man’s case until he is honest about it or out of the room. Shout out to Newark. Shout out to every Black woman content creator who was in that room on May 8, 2024 and held the line. We saw what they did. We never forgot.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER Become a paid subscriber to Education Is ElevationI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.This Cory Booker timeline you just read is exactly the kind of work that does not exist anywhere else. Two years of receipts. Voting records cross-referenced with public statements. A Black radical tradition lens on a Black liberal senator who is about to ask for your vote in 2028. Cable news will not give you this. The Times will not give you this. I will. Become a paid subscriber and let’s keep building the room where the receipts live.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The beef has a birthday. May 8, 2024, at a D.C. content creator summit, Cory Booker climbed a table to praise new media after voting to ban TikTok, dismissed a Black woman creator with “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill” when she asked about a Rafa ceasefire, and tried to weaponize Sudan as a humanitarian shield to dodge the question.* The Sudan deflection is a tell. Sudan is real. 17.1 million women and girls need aid. The UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Booker has done nothing material for Sudan. Naming Sudan to dodge a question about Rafa is using Black African suffering as a rhetorical prop, which is itself a form of the same colonial logic.* The 25-hour speech and the Kushner vote are the same record. Twenty-five hours of empty floor time passed zero bills. The lone Democratic yes on Charles Kushner happened weeks later. Performance and capitulation are not opposites — they are the same political product packaged for two different audiences.* The AIPAC pipeline is the structural story. $877,000 in single-issue PAC money across the cycle, including the senator’s first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in office, then a conversion narrative announced in time for a 2028 primary. The money explains the votes. The conversion explains the brand.* Black liberalism and Black leftism are not the same thing. A Black liberal will jump on the table. A Black leftist asks whose table it is. The distinction is not personal — it is strategic, historical, and rooted in a Southern Black radical tradition that Booker’s coastal liberalism keeps trying to erase.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.RELATED READINGS * Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. — The foundational text on misogynoir as a specific analytic. Essential for reading the May 8, 2024 dismissal as political technology, not improvisation.* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000 (revised edition). — Controlling images and the matrix of domination. The framework for how “you don’t understand the bill” functions as a controlling image, not a remark.* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. — The founding text of Black feminist intersectional politics. Proof that not all Black feminism is liberal. Necessary for the Black liberal / Black leftist distinction.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 1991. — Intersectionality’s foundational legal-theoretical text. Frames why a Black woman creator’s question is structurally distinct from any other question in that room.* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. — Hooks’s foundational critique of how Black women’s political analysis is systematically dismissed. Direct line to the May 8 moment.* Davis, Angela Y. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016. — The essential text linking Black liberation to Palestinian liberation. Direct framework for why Booker’s Rafa-to-Sudan pivot cannot stand.* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983 (2000 reprint). — Racial capitalism as the engine, not the aberration. Frames the AIPAC pipeline as structural rather than personal.* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010. — Afropessimist analysis of gratuitous violence and the fungibility of Black flesh. Reads Booker’s deflection as constitutive, not exceptional.* Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997. — The genealogy of how Black suffering gets transmuted into political currency for others. Background for the Sudan-as-shield analysis.* Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987. — Foundational for the analysis of how Black women in that D.C. room were positioned to absorb the senator’s condescension.* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. — The Pan-Africanist economic history that exposes selective humanitarian rhetoric about African suffering.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe