President Obama on Saturday encouraged black youths to get more involved in the political process as he spoke to graduating students at Howard University.
Advertisement
“First of all – and this should not be a problem for this group – be confident in your heritage”.
“This institution has been the home of many firsts, the first African American Nobel Peace Prize victor, the first black Supreme Court Justice, but it’s mission has been to ensure those firsts were not the last”, Obama said.
‘Now Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night and Beyonce runs the world, ‘ he said, making a point about diversity.
“Change”, he added, “requires more than righteous anger”.
“Racism persists, inequality persists”. “And then people are wondering, well, how come Obama hasn’t gotten this done?” This drew cheers and applause, but the president reiterated, “That’s a different discussion for another speech”.
Obama also reflected on race relations at the historically black college, telling students America is a better place not just for black people, but for all people in 2016, than when he graduated college in 1983. Shoot, as Larry Wilmore pointed out last week, a lot of folks didn’t even think blacks had the tools to be a quarterback.
At the same time, while they were taking classes at Howard’s campus, the nation grappled with police shootings in Ferguson and other places; mass incarcerations of blacks; and the water crisis in the majority black city of Flint, Michigan.
When President Obama was elected, “it led me to believe that I could do anything”, said Wilson, 28, who is black.
“Now, it’s your turn”, the president told the graduating class. He said, “I am here to ask you to reject the notion we are gripped by forces that we can not control”.
The president praised Howard alum, author and Atlantic national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the National Book Award for “Between the World and Me”, an epistolary memoir about being black in America, and wrote a 2016 series of Marvel’s comic Black Panther.
The speeches are Obama’s final commencement addresses as president.
“Harriet Tubman may be going on the 20, 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”, he said.
Watch President Obama’s commencement speech at Howard University above. This is the only advanced democracy on earth that goes out of its way to make it hard for people to vote, and there’s a reason for it, there’s a legacy to that. “You have to go through life with more than just passion for change”. “I am not saying gaps do not persist”, the President said.
Advertisement
“I want you to have”. But Obama is deeply moderate – he strongly believe that democracy works best when both sides are willing to give and take.
