“Rap and hip hop were counterculture, underground”. The president even cited showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ domination of Thursday night programming on ABC as evidence that black Americans have made enduring progress.
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Congratulations to the Howard University class of 2016!
Obama asked graduates to “be confident in your blackness”.
“Be confident in your heritage”.
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. But he rejected that way of thinking. “There’s no straitjacket, there’s no constraints, there’s no litmus test for authenticity”. “It can be frustrating and it can be slow, but history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse”, Obama said.
“That is our particular awareness of injustice, and unfairness, and struggle”.
Obama in his speech acknowledged transgender people are among those who continue to struggle in the U.S.
He encouraged students to vote “all the time, not just when it’s cool”-seeking, perhaps, to ensure that the young minorities who helped him win two presidential elections stay engaged when he’s not on the ballot this coming November”.
Obama told the 2,300 Howard graduates to embrace their identity.
The president told the crowd of graduates, whose ages ranged from 20 to 74, that he was proud of the work done by the “new guard” of black Civil Rights leaders, including activists from the Black Lives Matter Movement.
But “the election itself was just one indicator of how attitudes have changed”, Mr. Obama said. That’s something Obama knows well, since he began his career as a community organizer in Chicago. “Not just hashtags, but votes”, he said. He said denying progress in race relations would rob people of their capacity and responsibility to do what they can do to make America better. “God may have blessed them, but it wasn’t nothing you did”, he said, nodding to the many less-fortunate people in the world, including refugees, immigrants, and the rural poor. “It’s not that complicated”.
“You need to have the same confidence”, he said. We live in a political climate where Democrats and Republicans are often unwilling to work together.
Moreover, he says change requires compromise, and “listening to those with whom you disagree”. “This is hard to explain sometimes”. “If you think 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 because she did, she ended up shaping numerous recommendations of that task force.
He said there is still work for Howard’s graduates and others to do.
“It was very real”, said Blake, adding that she thought race relations had improved under President Obama. Because of the volume of reader comments, we can not review individual moderation decisions with readers. “That’s the truth”, Obama said.
Speaking on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Obama invoked the Langston Hughes poem Mother to Son to drive that point home.
“That may not seem fair”, he went on, but life is not fair. “Nobody promised you a crystal stair”.
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“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”.
