Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton. The students at Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts) invited her to give the commencement address at their graduation last month, which I hope you will watch above-- and I hope you will feel as inspired by it as I was. Fox News was inspired as well. They ran a clip from the speech-- "[Y]ou are graduating into a world of uncertainty and one that is increasingly dangerous. These dangers manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most extreme illustration now resides in the White House. The president of the United States, the most powerful politician in the world, is a racist sexist megalomaniac. It is not a benign observation but has meant tragic consequences for many people in our country."Fox viewers were inspired to deluge her with hate mail and death threats, which has forced her to cancel upcoming speeches in Seattle and San Diego out of fear for her and her family's safety. "I have received more than fifty hate-filled and threatening emails," she explained. "Some of these emails have contained specific threats of violence, including murder... I have been repeatedly called 'nigger,' 'bitch,' 'cunt,' 'dyke,' 'she-male' and 'coon'-- a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence. I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head." Some of the highlights from her address:
"I teach at an elite Ivy League university but I don’t consider myself an academic. I have always been an organizer who tries to communicate the urgency of our political moment through the lens of history and the concerns of ordinary people.I’m not here to tell you what to do with your lives, but I will tell you what I think is necessary to be in this world we live in right now. Today is recognition of the sacrifices that you and your family have made to finish college, but you are graduating into a world of uncertainty and one that is increasingly dangerous.These dangers manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most extreme illustration now resides in the White House. The president of the United States, the most powerful politician in the world, is a racist sexist megalomaniac. It is not a benign observation but has meant tragic consequences for many people in our country.From the terror-inducing raids in the communities of undocumented immigrants; to his disparaging of refugees in search of freedom and respite; he has empowered an attorney general who embraces and promulgates policies that have already been proven to have had a devastating impact on Black families and communities; he thinks that climate science is “fake” and his eagerness to take the country into war can only be interpreted as a callous disregard for its steep price in both money and human life. This list could continue but suffice to say that Donald Trump has fulfilled the promises of a campaign organized and built upon racism, corporatism, and militarism.But we would be remiss to think that the new president has appeared from nowhere, inexplicably into our otherwise fine democracy. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how we got into this predicament without understanding the deep wells of bitterness, resentment, and anger that have been bubbling beneath the surface of our society for some time. This is not just about partisan battles over whether “race or class” decided the presidential election, rather, it is recognizing, simply, that the political and economic status quo have failed, over and over again, to deliver a better way for the vast majority of people in this country.For too long, civility and good manners in electoral politics have passed as effective governance, hiding the mundane, daily struggles of ordinary people. For too long, the quietude of the status quo has been misinterpreted as indifference to inequality and injustice that pervades our nation. For millions of people, the status quo that is increasingly intolerable. It gnaws away at the tiny threads that millions of people are hanging onto in their daily struggles to make the ends meet. We live in a celebrity culture that glorifies the rich and the famous while ignoring the daily struggles of ordinary people. Imagine if we had a press, a popular culture or political class that was curious about the lives of regular people. What would they find about the status quo?They would find the deepening crisis of opioid addiction... The status quo is found in the suffocating racism and poverty in Chicago that has created the conditions for the debilitating gun violence in the city streets that has taken hundreds of Black and Brown lives. It is found in the shocking reality that life expectancy has declined for working class white women, while 55 percent of Black workers-- mostly Black women-- in this country live on less than $15 an hour in meaningless jobs. The status quo is found in the fact that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been deported through raids. It's found when the US military drops something called "the mother of all bombs," the largest non-nuclear weapon, that we have media more interested in the size of the bomb than the human lives destroyed by it. That is the status quo....But when our political system-- not this or that party-- but our political system is led by a billionaire president and a Congress composed mostly of white men who are millionaires, is it any wonder that many people-- most people-- have been left behind?"... Now is the time for defiance.
It gets better. Please watch it. Several people have asked me to see if I could recruit her to run for office. I wouldn't wish that on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, although setting her loose on Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Miss McConnell, Patrick McHenry, Darrell Issa, Steve King, Lamar Smith, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Mark Meadows would be a real palliative for our poor battered country. Imagine any of them trying to come to grips with what she's talking about. Imagine them having to hear from her every time Congress, for example, was called to order.