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Volume 8, Issue 4; December 2007

Seek passion and the spirit of youth and service in all you do . . .

Johnnetta B. Cole*

My sisters and my brothers all, Good morning!

Now in the black church that I grew up in, we would say, “This is a great getting up morning!”  I address you all as sisters and brothers not because we are connected as kin, through “blood.”  I address you that way, as I learned in Anthropology, because kinship is about far more than “blood”.  It’s about behavior, how we treat each other, and it’s about shared vision.  And since we are all here in this place sharing a belief in the power of education you are my sisters and my brothers, all. 

I turn to address The Brother Chair of the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas.  And what a joy it is for me to greet a colleague and a friend, the Brother President of this great University, Dr. Sugg.      

We have come together for the obvious reason that we want to celebrate you and your accomplishments.  To complete your course of study at this university is no small task; and so, I declare that you are he-roes and she-roes.  For every hero in this world, there’s at least one she-roe.

Now, where I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, the old folk would say this: “A woman will be known by the company she keeps”.  This morning, how fortunate I am to be keeping company with a man I respect and admire, H. Lee Scott.  In fact, I’m prepared to say that being in your company puts me “in high cotton.”   

This morning, I am also in the company of someone that I deeply respect, admire and love, your sister vice chancellor for student affairs, Johnetta Cross Brazzell.  

And how good it is to be in the company of the class of 007.  Those folk who refuse to accept the possibility that getting these advanced degrees is a mission impossible.  You have proven that it is indeed possible.

I’m trained as an anthropologist and so I want you to know that I understand the role of ritual and of ceremony.  Clearly an integral feature of such a ceremony is the giving of advice, and I must say that Brother President Lee Scott gave some mighty good counsel.  I took down the three points; I don’t promise to always give you credit when I repeat them.

What I’m about to say to you in the form of my counsel may seem too basic for folk who are getting these fancy degrees.  After all, there are students among you who can explain the second theory of thermodynamics in physics.  There’s probably an anthropologist here who can go on forever about double unilineal descent systems in West Africa.  But hear me well, my sisters and brothers, this is basic but good counsel.

First, if you don’t already have it, get passionate.  Get passionate about what it is you are to do with your life.  And if you don’t feel the passion, then keep searching until you find the next field of study or the work that you can engage in with passion.  Our great, great leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “If it falls upon you to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted.  Sweep streets like Beethoven wrote music.  Sweep streets so that all the world will say, ‘there goes a great street sweeper’.”

My second piece of advice is never ever-ever grow up.  I say that in the sense that you should never move beyond those characteristics that are associated with the young.  Inquisitiveness, idealism, and risk-taking, (I do ask you to only take make well-calculated wise risks, but take them).

A part of my request to you to never grow up asks that you never lose an interest, an engagement, an involvement in education.  Indeed make this a life-long activity.   

Third, I ask you to never end up being able to take care of yourself.  If there are parents here there may well be some little disagreement on that point.  They’ve been saying when are you going to take care of yourself?  In fact this role I have been playing as your human ATM—I’d like to retire that role.  And for those of you who are in relationships, your spice (that’s the plural of spouse) your significant other, they’re saying, no, it’s time now for you to able to take care of yourself.  No, never do it.  In the sense that never be able to take care of yourself—alone.  As your Brother Chair of the Board spoke about so beautifully—your responsibility and mine—is always to take care of others.   

Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Life’s most persistent question is, what are you doing for others?”  The great African-American woman educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune said often, and she would say to you graduates today “Go ahead, climb to the top, go ahead with your bad selves.”  Well, she wouldn’t put it that way, but she would have said, “Go on and climb to the top.   But you must remember to lift others as you climb.”  

And my fourth and final counsel to you is this:  keep looking in the mirror.  Look every day.  See yourself, and I trust you are proud of who it is that you see.  And then when you look at yourself you see someone whose ego is in check, you see someone capable of listening to critics, you see someone full of integrity.

But I also hope that when you look in that mirror you’re prepared to welcome into your eyesight, into your world, those who look so differently from you.  Those of different races and ethnicities, those of different classes, of different religions, different sexual orientations, those who are differently-abled.  Because until each of us can look at ourselves and see a diverse world, none of us will get to where we need to be.  

And so, dear class, the 007 class—those who made the mission possible—all that is left for me to say to you, not from the top—not from the middle—but from the bottom of my heart is this: congratulations and Godspeed. 

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* Johnnetta B. Cole is the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Johnnetta B. Cole Global Diversity & Inclusion Institute founded at Bennett College for Women (Greensboro, NC) and President Emeritus of Bennett and Spelman Colleges. She is also a 2007 recipient of the University of Arkansas Doctor of Arts and Sciences honoris causa.  This paper is based on her May 12, 2007 Commencement Address to the 2007 University of Arkansas graduates in Fayetteville, AR.