easyt65
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- Aug 4, 2015
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html?_r=0
"Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”
Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.
“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech.
From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.
Some of the ceremonies have also taken on a sharper edge, with speakers adding an activist overlay to the more traditional sentiments about proud families and bright futures.
...events like black commencements, he continued, serve only to “amplify” racial differences. “College is the place where we should be teaching and preaching the view that you’re an individual, and choose your associates to be based on other factors rather than skin color,” he said.
“Think about it,” Mr. Connerly added. “These kids went to Harvard, and they less than anyone in our society should worry about feeling welcome and finding comfort zones. They don’t need that.”
"Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”
Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.
“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech.
From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.
Some of the ceremonies have also taken on a sharper edge, with speakers adding an activist overlay to the more traditional sentiments about proud families and bright futures.
...events like black commencements, he continued, serve only to “amplify” racial differences. “College is the place where we should be teaching and preaching the view that you’re an individual, and choose your associates to be based on other factors rather than skin color,” he said.
“Think about it,” Mr. Connerly added. “These kids went to Harvard, and they less than anyone in our society should worry about feeling welcome and finding comfort zones. They don’t need that.”
