…”inequality persists” with the achievement gap in schools and the “justice gap” in jails.
“You have to go through life with more than just a passion for change — you have to have strategy,” The President said, pushing “not just awareness but action, not just hashtags but votes.”
“Change,” he added, “requires more than righteous anger.”
President Obama wound down his speech by quoting a phrase from award-winning author James Baldwin, “James Baldwin once said ‘Nothing everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can change unless it is faced.’”
Then he gave a charge to the graduates.
“Graduates, each of us is here only because someone else faced down the challenges for us. We’re only who we are because someone struggled and sacrificed for us. So when you journey seems to hard or when you run into a chorus of cynics who say you can’t do something, that you should stop believing or you should just settle…Then you may find useful a little phrase that I found handy these last eight years: YES. WE. CAN.”
President Obama To Howard University Graduates: “Be Confident In Your Blackness” was originally published on blackdoctor.org
