Commencement Address: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Taylor delivered the 2022 Commencement Address and received a Doctor of Laws, Honors Causa, from CUNY Law. These are her words.
Taylor is a Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press.
Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. Her earlier book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016.
She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among other publications. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
In 2016, Taylor was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change-makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
Taylor is currently working on a project examining the retreat in the 1980s from the promise of civil rights, alongside the emergence of widening chasms in Black America along social, economic, and political fault lines.
Remarks
I want to begin by thanking Dean Eduardo Capluong and the graduates for inviting me today. And I want to extend my thanks to Student Affairs, the Student Graduation Committee, the Department of Communications, the Department of Events and all staff volunteers for making this day a reality.
When I first heard from my old friend, your interim Dean here at CUNY law about the opportunity to address this graduating class, I did not hesitate in accepting.
Like thousands of other New Yorkers, I am an almost-graduate of the City University of New York system. In many ways my story reads like a CUNY story or an old CUNY story.
I was a student at SUNY Buffalo for two years, moved to New York City, worked full time for a year and then decided to go back to school. I took out thousands of dollars in federal loans that allowed me to live in New York City while also going to school full time.
But there is no price I would put on the education that I received during the three years, I was student at the City College of New York. I learned about the perils of administrators who try to treat colleges like businesses—prioritizing provosts over educators, investing in growth instead of directly in students’ education.
But more importantly, I learned about solidarity between students from all kinds of backgrounds, families, ethnicities and experiences. We came together to fight for affordable tuition even when we knew that CUNY was once free. We rallied to keep CUNY open to the working class, to immigrants, to women to the ordinary people of New York who make this city function.
I had teachers, professors who were in love with ideas, books, language, politics and struggle and imbued that love in me. So it is with tremendous humility, pride, and honor that I come here to address you today.
This is a time of reflection and celebration, but it is also a time to map out the direction of your lives, your course. And to do so requires a grasp of our current context.
We are living through an extraordinary period of uncertainty and even peril. We are surrounded by warning signs that life in this country must change. It is the existential threat posed by climate change.
It is the shameful threat of eviction and homelessness in the wealthiest nation on earth. It is rising poverty amidst extraordinary wealth and privilege. It is debt.
You, like I, will have taken out thousands of dollars in student loans, allowing us to live in New York City while going to school full time. The burdensome reality of indebtedness, especially in a society where the cost of living seems to rise with each passing day, lures us into the most lucrative work with the biggest paycheck.
Our debt creates the pressure to abide by the idea that the most important thing that we do is take care of ourselves, practice “personal responsibility”, and sacrifice all to pay off our debts. Debt works to dull our senses to the outside world so that we might burrow further into each of our holes, hoping to one day, dig ourselves out.
But the world needs you right now. In 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the graduates of Oberlin College he said pointedly, “There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.
There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development.
Victor Hugo said on one occasion that “there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come.”
Two years ago in the summer of 2020 we all caught a glimpse of the potential of a social revolution might look like in the twenty-first century. It was massive.
The New York Times calculated that between fifteen and twenty-six million people marched in more than five thousand protests over the course of the summer. While those marches had been catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day of that year, its sustenance and longevity had been fueled by a deep sense that something was and is deeply wrong in this country.
The pandemic had exposed deep, abiding inequalities that meant people would have to die because they were poor or because their work could not be done from home, or because they could not, not show up to work or because hospitals would not believe them when they described their symptoms.
It exposed how little our country had invested in systems of care that could provide for ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. Somehow, the most powerful nation on earth—the U.S.—that could coordinate military missions overseas, would not coordinate the timely delivery of Personal Protection Equipment for healthcare workers.
Not because it could not, but it would not because the safety and health of regular, ordinary people were not worth the effort.
One million people in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID. A recent report found that within the top 300 counties with the highest death rates, 45% of the population in those counties, on average, lives below the poverty line. The threadbare nature of our social safety net was not only visible for the entire world to see, but we saw it.
You saw it, among the counties with punishingly high poverty and death rates in the Bronx, where 56% of the population is Latino and 29% Black. More than half of the borough lives under the poverty line, and the Covid death rate is among the highest 10% in the US.
These savage inequalities were mapped onto the degrading and humiliating nature of police abuse and violence so tragically captured in the brutal assault on George Floyd. We have been sharply attuned to these abuses for the last ten years since the death of Trayvon Martin in the winter of 2012.
For more than ten years, the idea whose time had come was that which affirmed that Black Lives Matter. But between the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, millions came into the streets not only to make Black Lives Matter but to also say that poor people’s lives matter, working-class lives matter, immigrant lives matter, drug addicts’ lives matter, houseless people’s lives matter, incarcerated lives matter, Brown lives matter, trans lives matter, women’s lives matter.
The protests in 2020 were important not just because they were big but because of what their bigness or their size indicated. They indicated that despite all that we are told in our society that we should care primarily about ourselves, the size of the protests demonstrated that we care about each other.
The protests also meant that we saw each other and our suffering was no longer just our own; our fears were not our alone; our rage was not our alone. The protests knit us together into a web of solidarity, mutual understanding, sympathy, support, and understanding.
It’s a beautiful display of unity, strength, and power is why that rupturing social movement has provoked such a vicious and determined response. Not only have the most rudimentary of the demands from those protests been ignored such as federal police reform legislation and a renewed commitment to voting rights but they have been replaced by bipartisan promises to expand funding to police with no promises of oversight and complete silence on voting rights.
Where protests called for an end to systemic racism, those demands have been met with either outright bans or attempts to ban what state legislators called “critical race theory”. State governments have led the way in banning books or trying to ban books. During Black history month, Florida passed a law that makes it a crime for businesses or schools to make anyone feel “discomfort” or “guilt” about race.
We are told that our country is unique, exceptional even, because we are guided by the rule of law. The rule of law, we are told, means that we are ultimately guided by facts, reason and logic—all of which prevail through a deliberative process where elected representatives ultimately vote on the rules and regulations by which we govern ourselves.
Neither a theocracy nor monarchy, the power of our society is propelled by the people. Aligned with this story of logical self-rule, is an accompanying fable that the history of our country always bends towards progress, towards a more perfect union. It is a nice narrative that usually crowds out a more complicated reality.
But the description of the undeniable progress that has occurred in this country was not simply the natural progression or forward march of history. Our rights, any notion of social progress, has come through struggle.
Struggle propelled by the desires and determination of ordinary people for a better life and the absolute willingness to suffer and sacrifice to make it so.
And in so many of those cases, those struggles have compelled those people to break the law in order to create space for new reforms, new possibilities and new life chances.
The law is not some sacrosanct script to which we must express mindless fidelity to. The entire process through which our laws are created, confirmed, and adjudicated are thoroughly imbued with the biases of the elite and powerful.
In the last week, the Supreme Court has once again, yet again, exposed the extent to which this is true. The Court, we are told, is void of politics and partisanship, beholden only to the law itself. But when a draft of the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, the craven, elitist and profoundly undemocratic nature of the Court was exposed.
This is a draft and the ruling has not been made but the writing is on the wall. We are told the SCOTUS is not partisan body and yet conservative Republicans in the White House and Senate have schemed and plotted to place judges on the body with the expressed intent of rolling back Roe v. Wade and other laws that conflict with their narrow and bigoted world view.
Alito, who speaks for the majority in his draft opinion, claims that because the constitution does not enumerate “privacy” as a right to which anyone is entitled. Thus, the law which has held abortion as a right of privacy is erroneous and thus not protected as a constitutional right. He goes on to claim that only those rights that are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions” can be honored when they are not directly addressed by the Constitution.
And what exactly are the traditions of a nation founded on the genocide of the indigenous population, that created its wealth through the use of heritable, racial slavery and that multiplied that wealth through the brutal exploitation of Mexican, Chinese and other forms of labor? What Alito and his four colleagues are proposing a dangerous calculus for determining the rights of others.
While the Supreme Court is prepared to cavalierly kick this issue to the states where they claim women can simply exercise their right to vote on the issue—even as national representatives of the Republican Party now gloat about being within reach of passing federal bans on abortion to prevent the procedure anywhere in the United States—the raw power of power and privilege threatens to upend the citizenship, freedom, and self-determination for women and anyone else who may ever need an abortion.
If women do not have this most elemental self-possession and autonomy: the right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term or to terminate, then women do not have the same rights as men.
In explaining the decision of the majority, Alito invoked arguments used by the Attorney General of Mississippi who brought the lawsuit with the expressed hope of ending abortion. Realizing that the argument in favor of women’s autonomy and self-determination is a powerful one, Mississippi invented a new world where pregnant women face no hardships or discrimination and thus there are no reasons for them to terminate their pregnancy, Women can have it all.
The SCOTUS parroted these fictions by claiming that because discrimination against pregnant women is illegal, pregnant women face no particular threat to their livelihood. They say that because unpaid maternal leave is guaranteed in law, women no longer must choose between their jobs and taking care of their children.
Justice Amy Coney Barret claims that because all fifty states easily allow women to terminate parental rights then there is no burden placed upon women who can easily just renounce parenting and give their unwanted child away.
Not only does this chilling framework ignores that Black women are three to four times more at risk of dying in childbirth than white women, but ignores that pregnancy and childbirth are also burdensome to health, mobility, independence, and sometimes to life itself, and women are profoundly disadvantaged in that they alone bear these burdens.
This, of course, is why abortion, birth control, sexual freedom, and opposition to forced sterilization were all the constitutive elements of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Women could never break from the perception that they were inferiors confined to the interior of their households, prepared only to do housework, cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, as long as they could not control their own capacity to reproduce or not reproduce.
There was no reason for women to go to college or to demand good jobs if the only real expectations for them were to be mothers or housewives. This of course did not just affect mothers and housewives, but all women were trapped and tainted by these perceptions which is why sexual and reproductive freedom were at the center of the women’s liberation movement.
In the fantasy world of these conservative judges, if discrimination is illegal then there is no discrimination. If women face no legal burdens then there are no legal burdens to be faced.
It is a conveniently naïve worldview that inserts the power of the state to force women to give birth while freeing the state from any responsibility to care for those children. On this issue, these justices are silent as if this is some discreet issue and not absolutely determinative of the decision to bear children. Our society has repeatedly rejected the responsibility of social provision for healthcare, housing, income, public education and the entire public infrastructure necessary to care for children and their families. The mantra of “personal responsibility” or every person for themselves has replaced the social responsibility that underlies the meaning of society.
Human beings are social creatures meaning that we create lives together, mutually and that we need each other to survive. But none of this is reflected in the assumed sacrosanctity of the law we herald as that which supposedly makes us a superior society. Even when the Court has ruled in ways that appear to be in the interest of minorities or socially and economically marginalized populations, its decisions can be ephemeral, susceptible to partisan shifts, while creating the dangerous illusion of permanence.
The Roe v. Wade decision, in 1973, was made in the midst of the women’s-liberation movement, in which reproductive freedom and access to abortion were central demands. In subsequent decades, the changing political climate, including the strategic decisions of liberal feminist organizations to focus their resources and organizing on electoral politics, and not on the street-level mobilizations that won the right to abortion in the first place, has contributed to the erosion of support for abortion rights.
The idea that sympathetic politicians were the key to maintaining access to abortion missed the historical lesson that pressure generated by social movements has the greatest potential to overcome the inherently conservative bent of the Court. The fluidity with which rights can be bequeathed and taken away, in fact, reduces rights to privileges. In a truly democratic society, civil rights should not be contingent on a fortuitous combination of Supreme Court Justices.
The brewing struggle around the rights of women in this country is only one measure of what has been described as growing polarization in our society. Often, polarization is seen as bad with two sides so tightly wound around their positions that they cannot see the viewpoint of the opposing side and thus compromise—the melding of the two sides together—is lost.
While abstract, the idea of compromise sounds appealing, even romantic. But through the prism of real life what does it mean to compromise when it comes to the rights of women? Which rights shall we have, and which shall we forgo to accommodate the viewpoint of someone else?
When it comes to voting rights, which shall we preserve and which shall we jettison to appease those who believe the 2020 election was stolen from he who lost? When it comes to the rights transgendered teenagers and others, which of their rights should we give up to appease the supposed concern of those who do not believe that they have the right to exist?
When it comes to forming a union, which rights should we retain and which should we forgo when it comes to allowing workers to protect themselves from the interests of multi-billion dollar companies —rights which are fundamentally at odds with each other which is why the wealthy fight so hard to prevent low wage workers from forming unions in the first place.
Sometimes polarization clarifies what is at stake. It doesn’t mean you should be close-minded and hostile to ideas that are not your own. The first step in being an important organizer, advocate, collaborator is listening, understanding what is being said, what is intended, perhaps even empathizing, and determining whether there is a path that we can reach together.
But we cannot become so enchanted with the idea of civility, tone and good manners that we sleep through the revolution, we stand on the sidelines of struggle and that we allow our rights and the rights of others to be stripped from us for the sake of decorum.
Books banned, critical race theory bans, 1619 banned, discussing racism banned, abortion banned, pills to induce abortion banned, medical treatment for transgender teenagers banned, they will be coming for birth control, gay marriage, and any other laws they believe do not conform to their way of looking at the world. No one is coming to save us, we are the movement we have been waiting for.
In his address to the Oberlin graduates in 1965, King also said: “[W]e must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”
What time is it today? It is a time when we must pick sides and fight for that which is right. What is right, is expanding social, political and economic rights for the many—not constricting or eliminating them.
What is right, is seeking to help the voiceless, the marginalized find their voice;
What is right is using your new skills and your education to help those who are oppressed, overcome;
What is right is to use your gifts to lift up those who have been trodden over by the powerful, influential, and authoritarian.
This is not charity, but solidarity because if they come for the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed—then you can rest assured they will be coming for the rest of us in the morning.
In 1918, socialist and labor organizer Eugene Debs was sentenced to prison for the crime of sedition because he spoke in opposition to the U.S.’s involvement in World War One.
Upon his conviction, he made a statement to the court. I will leave you with the words he said to the court because they embody the solidarity, commitment and hope that we will all need to draw upon in this time of uncertainty.
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points, the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
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