Sen. Booker: “I loved a book I read called In Search of My Mother’s Garden, by Alice Walker, where she talks about — it’s a chapter where she’s giving advice to revolutionaries, in this case, black revolutionaries, and she says, “The real revolutionary is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff: the raising a child’s reading level from third-grade to fourth; the filling out food stamp forms for folks, because they have to eat, revolution or not. The real revolutionary is always close enough to the people to be there for them when they’re needed.”

Sen. Booker: Well, I question people a lot about what we say about other people says more about who we are than who they are. And it was that moment when I first started on Martin Luther King Boulevard, with Miss Jones, where she checked me, hard, and she said, “Describe the neighborhood.” And I described it like I did to you — the drug dealing, the projects, the abandoned building. And she just said to me, in a very curt way, “Boy, you need to understand that the world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you, and if you’re one of those people who only sees darkness, despair, that’s all there’s ever gonna be. But if you see hope, opportunity, if you’re stubborn enough to, every time you open your eyes, see love and the face of God, then you can be a change agent here. Then you can make a difference.”

From On Being 7/18