BLOOMFIELD COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY
May 25, 2000
Speech by Cornel West
I hope and pray that you always muster the courage to be. And by courage to be, I mean the courage to tell the painful yet empowering souls about yourself. You embody and enact that courage in the face of the forces of conformity and mediocrity and mendacity and dishonesty and falsity. Shakespeare is right, “To thine own self be true.” And the class of 2000 enacts that.
And also never forget that you must marshall the courage to love, even after this grand achievement. If you fall into the pit of indifference--and indifference is the one trait in us that always makes the very angels weep.
Always muster the courage to love, and by love I mean the most daring, difficult and dangerous, yet delightful and lovely force in the universe. By love I mean that that forces us to take off the mask we know we cannot live within but fear we cannot live without. It takes courage to love especially if you accept the vicious dogmas of white supremacy or male supremacy, the crass arrogance or national haughtiness or heterosexist self perception.
Last but not least, and looking out at the class of 2000 I see it so clearly, that is the courage to hope. Because you see I come out of a black Baptist tradition that says that faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something. And to hope is to look whatever darkness in the face and say, as the great late Curtis Mayfield,
I am going to keep pushing anyway and anyhow. I see that in the spirit of the class of 2000.
So let us heed the words of Earth, Wind and Fire - keep your heads to the sky. Let us take seriously the deep insight of Mahalia Jackson when she says keep your hand on the plough. And last but not least, let us never forget the witness of freedom fighters of all colors in the 1960s who would sing “keep your eyes on the prize”. Something bigger than you and larger than you that can appeal to the best of you, that can access the better angels of your nature, and then you become a living example of the ways in which the world is incomplete and history is unfinished. And then you have and you will make a difference in the world. God bless you and be with you.
