President Barack Obama’s commencement address at
Howard University, May 7, 2016.
After his introductory remarks, he got the gist of
his speech. I believe it is one of the best speeches ever given in America to
any audience. The emphasis in bold is mine.
Given the current state of our political rhetoric
and debate, let me say something that may be controversial, and that is this: America is a better place today than it was
when I graduated from college. (Applause.) Let me repeat: America is by
almost every measure better than it was when I graduated from college. It also
happens to be better off than when I took office -- (laughter) -- but that's a
longer story. (Applause.) That's a different discussion for another speech.
But think about it. I graduated in 1983. New York
City, America’s largest city, where I lived at the time, had endured a decade
marked by crime and deterioration and near bankruptcy. And many cities were in
similar shape. Our nation had gone through years of economic stagnation, the stranglehold
of foreign oil, a recession where unemployment nearly scraped 11 percent. The
auto industry was getting its clock cleaned by foreign competition. And don’t
even get me started on the clothes and the hairstyles. I've tried to eliminate
all photos of me from this period. I thought I looked good. (Laughter.) I was
wrong.
Since that year -- since the year I graduated --
the poverty rate is down. Americans with college degrees, that rate is up.
Crime rates are down. America’s cities have undergone a renaissance. There are
more women in the workforce. They’re earning more money. We’ve cut teen
pregnancy in half. We've slashed the African American dropout rate by almost 60
percent, and all of you have a computer in your pocket that gives you the world
at the touch of a button. In 1983, I was part of fewer than 10 percent of
African Americans who graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Today, you’re part of
the more than 20 percent who will. And more than half of blacks say we’re
better off than our parents were at our age -- and that our kids will be better
off, too.
So America is better. And the world is better, too. A wall came down in Berlin. An Iron
Curtain was torn asunder. The obscenity of apartheid came to an end. A young
generation in Belfast and London have grown up without ever having to think
about IRA bombings. In just the past 16 years, we’ve come from a world without
marriage equality to one where it’s a reality in nearly two dozen countries.
Around the world, more people live in democracies. We’ve lifted more than 1
billion people from extreme poverty. We’ve cut the child mortality rate
worldwide by more than half.
America is better. The world is better. And stay with me now -- race relations are
better since I graduated. That’s the truth. No, my election did not create
a post-racial society. I don’t know who was propagating that notion. That was
not mine. But the election itself -- and the subsequent one -- because the
first one, folks might have made a mistake. (Laughter.) The second one, they knew
what they were getting.
The election itself was just one indicator of how
attitudes had changed.
In my inaugural address, I remarked that just 60
years earlier, my father might not have been served in a D.C. restaurant -- at
least not certain of them. There were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Very few black judges. Shoot, as Larry Wilmore pointed out last week, a lot of
folks didn’t even think blacks had the tools to be a quarterback. Today, former
Bull Michael Jordan isn’t just the greatest basketball player of all time -- he
owns the team. (Laughter.)
When I was graduating, the main black hero on TV was
Mr. T. (Laughter.) Rap and hip hop were counterculture, underground. Now,
Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night, and Beyoncé runs the world. (Laughter.)
We’re no longer only entertainers, we're producers, studio executives. No
longer small business owners -- we're CEOs, we’re mayors, representatives,
Presidents of the United States. (Applause.)
I am not saying gaps do not persist. Obviously,
they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists. Don’t worry -- I’m going to get
to that. But I wanted to start, Class of 2016, by opening your eyes to the
moment that you are in.
If you had to choose one moment in history in which
you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be
-- what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay
or straight, what faith you'd be born into -- you wouldn’t choose 100 years
ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d
choose right now. If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine
Hansberry, “young, gifted, and black” in America, you would choose right now.
(Applause.)
I tell you all this because it's important to note
progress. Because to deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause
of justice, to the legions of foot soldiers; to not only the incredibly
accomplished individuals who have already been mentioned, but your mothers and
your dads, and grandparents and great grandparents, who marched and toiled and
suffered and overcame to make this day possible.
I tell you this not to lull
you into complacency, but to spur you into action -- because there’s still so
much more work to do, so many more miles to travel. And America needs you to
gladly, happily take up that work. You all have some work to do. So enjoy the
party, because you're going to be busy. (Laughter.)
Yes, our economy has recovered from crisis stronger
than almost any other in the world. But there are folks of all races who are
still hurting -- who still can’t find work that pays enough to keep the lights
on, who still can’t save for retirement. We’ve still got a big racial gap in
economic opportunity.
The overall unemployment rate is 5 percent, but the black
unemployment rate is almost nine. We’ve still got an achievement gap when black
boys and girls graduate high school and college at lower rates than white boys
and white girls. Harriet Tubman may be going on the twenty, but we’ve still got
a gender gap when a black woman working full-time still earns just 66 percent
of what a white man gets paid. (Applause.)
We’ve got a justice gap when too many black boys
and girls pass through a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded
jails. This is one area where things have gotten worse. When I was in college,
about half a million people in America were behind bars. Today, there are about
2.2 million. Black men are about six times likelier to be in prison right now
than white men.
Around the world, we’ve still got challenges to
solve that threaten everybody in the 21st century -- old scourges like disease
and conflict, but also new challenges, from terrorism and climate change.
So make no mistake, Class of 2016 -- you’ve got
plenty of work to do.
But as complicated and sometimes intractable as
these challenges may seem, the truth is that your generation is better positioned than any before you to meet those
challenges, to flip the script.
Now, how you do that, how you meet these
challenges, how you bring about change will ultimately be up to you. My
generation, like all generations, is too confined by our own experience, too
invested in our own biases, too stuck in our ways to provide much of the new
thinking that will be required.
But us old-heads have learned a few things that
might be useful in your journey. So with the rest of my time, I’d like to offer
some suggestions for how young leaders like you can fulfill your destiny and
shape our collective future -- bend it in the direction of justice and equality
and freedom.
First of all -- and this should not be a problem
for this group -- be confident in your
heritage. (Applause.)
Be confident in your blackness. One of the great
changes that’s occurred in our country since I was your age is the realization
there's no one way to be black. Take it from somebody who’s seen both sides of
debate about whether I'm black enough. (Laughter.) In the past couple months,
I’ve had lunch with the Queen of England and hosted Kendrick Lamar in the Oval
Office. There’s no straitjacket, there's no constraints, there's no litmus test
for authenticity.
Look at Howard. One thing most folks don’t know
about Howard is how diverse it is. When you arrived here, some of you were
like, oh, they've got black people in Iowa? (Laughter.) But it’s true -- this
class comes from big cities and rural communities, and some of you crossed
oceans to study here.
You shatter stereotypes. Some of you come from a long
line of Bison. Some of you are the first in your family to graduate from college.
(Applause.) You all talk different, you all dress different. You’re Lakers
fans, Celtics fans, maybe even some hockey fans. (Laughter.)
And because of those who've come before you, you
have models to follow. You can work for a company, or start your own. You can
go into politics, or run an organization that holds politicians accountable.
You can write a book that wins the National Book Award, or you can write the
new run of “Black Panther.” Or, like one of your alumni, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you
can go ahead and just do both. You can create your own style, set your own
standard of beauty, embrace your own sexuality.
Think about an icon we just lost -- Prince. He blew
up categories. People didn’t know what Prince was doing. (Laughter.) And folks
loved him for it.
You need to have the same confidence. Or as my
daughters tell me all the time, “You be you, Daddy.” (Laughter.) Sometimes
Sasha puts a variation on it -- "You do you, Daddy." (Laughter.) And
because you’re a black person doing whatever it is that you're doing, that
makes it a black thing. Feel confident.
Second, even as we each embrace our own beautiful,
unique, and valid versions of our blackness, remember the tie that does bind us as African Americans -- and that is our
particular awareness of injustice and unfairness and struggle. That means we
cannot sleepwalk through life.
We cannot
be ignorant of history. (Applause.) We can’t meet the world with a sense of entitlement.
We can’t walk
by a homeless man without asking why a society as wealthy as ours allows that
state of affairs to occur. We can’t just lock up a low-level dealer without
asking why this boy, barely out of childhood, felt he had no other options. We
have cousins and uncles and brothers and sisters who we remember were just as
smart and just as talented as we were, but somehow got ground down by
structures that are unfair and unjust.
And that means we have to not only question the
world as it is, and stand up for those
African Americans who haven’t been so lucky -- because, yes, you've worked
hard, but you've also been lucky. That's a pet peeve of mine: People who have
been successful and don’t realize they've been lucky. That God may have blessed
them; it wasn’t nothing you did.
So don’t have an attitude. But we must expand
our moral imaginations to understand and empathize with all people who are
struggling, not just black folks who are struggling -- the refugee, the
immigrant, the rural poor, the transgender person, and yes, the middle-aged
white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several
decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological
change, and feels powerless to stop it. You got to get in his head, too.
Number three: You
have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a
strategy. I'll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to
have a strategy. Not just awareness, but
action. Not just hashtags, but votes.
You see,
change requires more than righteous anger. It requires a program, and it
requires organizing. At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou
Hamer -- all five-feet-four-inches tall -- gave a fiery speech on the national
stage. But then she went back home to Mississippi and organized cotton pickers.
And she didn't have the tools and technology where you can whip up a movement
in minutes. She had to go door to door.
And I’m so proud of the new guard of
black civil rights leaders who understand this. It’s thanks in large part to
the activism of young people like many of you, from Black Twitter to Black
Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened -- white, black, Democrat,
Republican -- to the real problems, for example, in our criminal justice
system.
But to
bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It
requires changes in law, changes in custom. If you care about mass
incarceration, let me ask you: How are you pressuring members of Congress to
pass the criminal justice reform bill now pending before them? (Applause.) If
you care about better policing, do you know who your district attorney is? Do
you know who your state’s attorney general is? Do you know the difference? Do
you know who appoints the police chief and who writes the police training
manual?
Find out who they are, what their responsibilities
are. Mobilize the community, present them with a plan, work with them to bring
about change, hold them accountable if they do not deliver. Passion is vital, but you've got to have a
strategy.
And your
plan better include voting -- not just some of the time, but all the time.
(Applause.) It is absolutely true that 50 years after the Voting Rights Act,
there are still too many barriers in this country to vote. There are too many
people trying to erect new barriers to voting. This is the only advanced
democracy on Earth that goes out of its way to make it difficult for people to
vote. And there's a reason for that. There's a legacy to that.
But let me say this: Even if we dismantled every
barrier to voting, that alone would not change the fact that America has some
of the lowest voting rates in the free world.
In 2014, only 36 percent of Americans turned out to vote in the
midterms -- the second lowest participation rate on record. Youth turnout --
that would be you -- was less than 20 percent. Less than 20 percent. Four out
of five did not vote. In 2012, nearly two in three African Americans turned
out. And then, in 2014, only two in five turned out.
You don’t think that
made a difference in terms of the Congress I've got to deal with? And then people
are wondering, well, how come Obama hasn’t gotten this done? How come he didn’t
get that done? You don’t think that made a difference?
What would have happened
if you had turned out at 50, 60, 70 percent, all across this country? People
try to make this political thing really complicated. Like, what kind of reforms
do we need? And how do we need to do that?
You know what, just vote. It's math.
If you have more votes than the other
guy, you get to do what you want. (Laughter.) It's not that complicated.
And you
don’t have excuses.
You don’t have to guess the number of jellybeans
in a jar or bubbles on a bar of soap to register to vote. You don’t have to
risk your life to cast a ballot. Other people already did that for you.
(Applause.) Your grandparents, your great grandparents might be here today if
they were working on it.
What's your excuse? When we don’t vote, we give away
our power, disenfranchise ourselves -- right when we need to use the power that
we have; right when we need your power to stop others from taking away the vote
and rights of those more vulnerable than you are -- the elderly and the poor,
the formerly incarcerated trying to earn their second chance.
So you
got to vote all the time, not just when it’s cool, not just when it's time to
elect a President, not just when you’re inspired.
It's
your duty.
When it’s time to elect a member of Congress or a city councilman,
or a school board member, or a sheriff. That’s how we change our politics -- by
electing people at every level who are representative of and accountable to us.
It is not that complicated. Don’t make it complicated.
And
finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening,
as well.
In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and
being prepared to compromise.
When I was a state senator, I helped pass
Illinois’s first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation
requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were
successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement. I didn’t say to them,
oh, you guys are so racist, you need to do something. I understood, as many of
you do, that the overwhelming majority of police officers are good, and honest,
and courageous, and fair, and love the communities they serve.
And we knew there were some bad apples, and that
even the good cops with the best of intentions -- including, by the way,
African American police officers -- might have unconscious biases, as we all
do. So we engaged and we listened, and we kept working until we built
consensus. And because we took the time to listen, we crafted legislation that
was good for the police -- because it improved the trust and cooperation of the
community -- and it was good for the communities, who were less likely to be
treated unfairly.
And I can say this unequivocally: Without at least the
acceptance of the police organizations in Illinois, I could never have gotten
those bills passed. Very simple. They would have blocked them.
The point is, you need allies in a democracy.
That's just the way it is. I
t can be frustrating and it can be slow. But
history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse. That's
not just true in this country. It’s not a black or white thing. Go to any
country where the give and take of democracy has been repealed by one-party
rule, and I will show you a country that does not work.
And
democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right.
This is
hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going
to have to engage folks who disagree with you.
If you think that the only way
forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about
yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get
what you want.
And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you
will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more
cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and
more anger and more despair.
And that's never been the source of our progress.
That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.
We remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory, the power
of his letter from a Birmingham jail, the marches he led.
But he also sat down
with President Johnson in the Oval Office to try and get a Civil Rights Act and
a Voting Rights Act passed.
But they made things better. And you
know what, I will take better every time.
I
always tell my staff -- better is good, because you consolidate your gains and
then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.
Brittany Packnett, a member of the Black Lives
Matter movement and Campaign Zero, one of the Ferguson protest organizers, she
joined our Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Some of her fellow activists
questioned whether she should participate.
She rolled up her sleeves and sat at
the same table with big city police chiefs and prosecutors. And because she
did, she ended up shaping many of the recommendations of that task force. And
those recommendations are now being adopted across the country -- changes that
many of the protesters called for.
If young activists like Brittany had refused
to participate out of some sense of ideological purity, then those great ideas would
have just remained ideas.
But she did participate. And that’s how change
happens.
America is big and it is boisterous and it is more
diverse than ever. The president [of the university] told me that we've got a significant Nepalese
contingent here at Howard. I would not have guessed that. Right on. But it just
tells you how interconnected we're becoming. And with so many folks from so
many places, converging, we are not always going to agree with each other.
Another Howard alum, Zora Neale Hurston, once said
-- this is a good quote here:
“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to
more than one person.”
Think about that. That’s why our democracy gives us a process designed for us to settle our disputes
with argument and ideas and votes instead of violence and simple majority rule.
So don’t
try to shut folks out, don’t try to shut them down, no matter how much you
might disagree with them.
There's been a trend around the country of
trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view, or
disrupt a politician’s rally.
Don’t do that -- no matter how ridiculous or
offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths.
Because as
my grandmother used to tell me, every time a fool speaks, they are just
advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk. Let them talk. If you don’t,
you just make them a victim, and then they can avoid accountability.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge them.
Have the confidence to challenge them, the confidence in the rightness of your
position.
There will be times when you
shouldn’t compromise your core values, your integrity, and you will have the
responsibility to speak up in the face of injustice.
But listen. Engage. If
the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them.
Teach them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas.
And you might as well start
practicing now, because one thing I can guarantee you -- you will have to deal
with ignorance, hatred, racism, foolishness, trifling folks. (Laughter.)
I
promise you, you will have to deal with all that at every stage of your life.
That may not seem fair, but life has never been completely fair. Nobody
promised you a crystal stair. And if you want to make life fair, then you've
got to start with the world as it is.
So that’s my advice. That’s how you change things.
Change isn’t something that happens every four years or eight years; change is
not placing your faith in any particular politician and then just putting your
feet up and saying, okay, go.
Change is
the effort of committed citizens who hitch their wagons to something bigger
than themselves and fight for it every single day.
That’s what Thurgood Marshall understood -- a man
who once walked this year, graduated from Howard Law; went home to Baltimore,
started his own law practice. He and his mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston,
rolled up their sleeves and they set out to overturn segregation. They worked
through the NAACP. Filed dozens of lawsuits, fought dozens of cases. And after
nearly 20 years of effort -- 20 years -- Thurgood Marshall ultimately succeeded
in bringing his righteous cause before the Supreme Court, and securing the
ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that separate could never be equal.
(Applause.)
Twenty years.
Marshall, Houston -- they knew it would not be
easy. They knew it would not be quick. They knew all sorts of obstacles would
stand in their way. They knew that even if they won, that would just be the
beginning of a longer march to equality. But they had discipline. They had
persistence. They had faith -- and a sense of humor. And they made life better
for all Americans.
And I know you graduates share those qualities. I
know it because I've learned about some of the young people graduating here
today. There's a young woman named Ciearra Jefferson, who’s graduating with
you. And I'm just going to use her as an example. I hope you don’t mind,
Ciearra.
Ciearra grew up in Detroit and was raised by a poor
single mom who worked seven days a week in an auto plant. And for a time, her
family found themselves without a place to call home. They bounced around
between friends and family who might take them in. By her senior year, Ciearra
was up at 5:00 am every day, juggling homework, extracurricular activities,
volunteering, all while taking care of her little sister. But she knew that
education was her ticket to a better life. So she never gave up. Pushed herself
to excel. This daughter of a single mom who works on the assembly line turned
down a full scholarship to Harvard to come to Howard. (Applause.)
And today, like many of you, Ciearra is the first
in her family to graduate from college. And then, she says, she’s going to go
back to her hometown, just like Thurgood Marshall did, to make sure all the
working folks she grew up with have access to the health care they need and
deserve. As she puts it, she’s going to be a “change agent.” She’s going to
reach back and help folks like her succeed.
And people like Ciearra are why I remain optimistic
about America. (Applause.) Young people like you are why I never give in to
despair.
James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is
faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Graduates, each of us is only here because someone
else faced down challenges for us. We are only who we are because someone else
struggled and sacrificed for us.
That's not just Thurgood Marshall’s story, or
Ciearra’s story, or my story, or your story -- that is the story of America. A
story whispered by slaves in the cotton fields, the song of marchers in Selma,
the dream of a King in the shadow of Lincoln. The prayer of immigrants who set
out for a new world. The roar of women demanding the vote. The rallying cry of
workers who built America. And the GIs who bled overseas for our freedom.
Now it’s your turn. And the good news is, you’re
ready. And when your journey seems too hard, and when you run into a chorus of
cynics who tell you that you’re being foolish to keep believing or that you
can’t do something, or that you should just give up, or you should just settle
-- you might say to yourself a little phrase that I’ve found handy these last
eight years: Yes, we can.
Congratulations, Class of 2016! (Applause.) Good
luck! God bless you. God bless the United States of America. I'm proud of you.
