Baccalaureate Remarks by
Mary Renda, Associate Professor of History
May 21, 2005

President Creighton, honored guests, colleagues, families, friends, and members of the class of 2005, we are here to celebrate.

Seniors, each of you has earned—at least—128 credits. Now, give yourselves credit. Give yourselves credit for every step you took along the way to this evening: credit for every book you read, every word you wrote, every curve you plotted, every chord you played, and every verb conjugation you tried to master. Give yourselves credit for every idea you loved and every attempt you made.

To know what you are capable of it helps to have some perspective on what you have already accomplished. And you—really, we all, we humans—are capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for.

So, give yourselves credit. Celebrate every paper, every lab, every oral presentation; every meet, race, or game; every brush stroke, dance step, stage set, film frame. Celebrate your singing, swimming, riding, tutoring, peer mentoring, your photographs and your foul shots. Celebrate yourselves for holding down jobs while you wrote papers, and for writing papers, some of you, while raising children.

This business of celebrating your accomplishments is not frivolous; it’s not extra. It’s essential. It helps you remember your capacity for action. And you are capable of no less than this: a life in which you refuse to compromise your own humanity—or your commitment to the humanity of others, whether they share your views, your background, your struggles, your privileges, your religion, or any other thing.

So, refuse to diminish your accomplishments. Were you surprised to land on this campus, the first in your family to go to college? Or did you always know you were headed for a cap and gown? For you both, and for all of you, this is a moment to mark and a moment to begin acknowledging the enormity, the singularity of what you have pulled off. No one knows all the ways you have triumphed. Even you don’t know: our minds, perhaps thankfully, only tell half the truth about what we’ve been up against in the world. But make no mistake: it is your accomplishment we are celebrating here. No one else has had precisely the same set of challenges, and no one else could have met them more elegantly, more brilliantly, more successfully than you have.

And what if you could discern and appreciate the elegance, the brilliance, of every like accomplishment small and large in those around you? What if we listened closely and attentively enough to the stories of those around us to see the singular elegance of their attempts to live out their own humanity in all its power and capacity for human caring?

If we do this, we enlarge the scope of our own agency. We are actually capable of more when we align ourselves with the humanity of others in this way, when we listen that well to one another. We sharpen our understanding of the world by seeing it from more perspectives. We come to understand the broader implications of arrangements that may or may not disturb our daily lives.

Remembering what you have the capacity for will also enable you to look squarely at what is wrong, see it for what it is, and find ways to act on what you see. Then, you may have to have a good cry, because your heart will break if you look squarely and closely at what is wrong in the world, if you listen to a wide enough range of stories. But we are remarkably resilient beings. Incredibly, our hearts mend.

Of course, if you’re paying attention, sometimes you’ll have to make choices where there seem to be no good choices. And at times it will be tempting to abandon your belief in the possibility of something better, something more human, or to settle for something much smaller than the vision you have now or the vision you are reaching for. Indeed there will likely be a deafening chorus of voices urging you to do so: to grow up, to face reality, to give up childish utopian fantasies. Maybe those voices are already ringing in your ears.

I urge you to resist them and offer you a perhaps unlikely pair of models for such resistance: Nelson Mandela and Lucy Renda, my mom.

Twenty seven years in South African prisons did not convince Nelson Mandela that he was powerless in the face of South African apartheid—or in the hands of his jailers. Think about this. In 1961, Nelson Mandela defied South African law by organizing a 3-day strike in response to the Sharpeville Massacre. Thrown in prison a few years later under the Suppression of Communism Act, Mandela was delivered into the hands of white prison guards who meted out cruelty, deprivation, and indignity on a daily basis. But Nelson Mandela refused to believe that those men were impervious to human regard. When eight guards surrounded him as he met his lawyer, he introduced each one by name and called them his “honor guard.”

Nelson Mandela believed so firmly in his own power to act that he could afford to see the humanity of his jailers. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela describes an especially difficult moment. He was leading his fellow political prisoners in a campaign to befriend one particularly hostile guard. They had been making slow progress, when one day, the guard did something that Mandela recognized as an attempt to show friendship. That is how Mandela described the guard’s act. And what had the guard done? He had thrown a sandwich down on the ground near them as a way of offering to share his lunch. Mandela later wrote: “This presented us with a dilemma. On the one hand, he was treating us as animals to whom he could toss a bit of slop, and I felt it would undermine our dignity to take the sandwich. On the other hand, we were hungry, and to reject the gesture altogether would humiliate the [person]… we were trying to befriend.” Mandela decided they should accept the food, and it proved a significant step. The guard became less hostile and in time came to embrace the principles of non-racialism, equal rights, and economic justice that Mandela held out.

I grew up in the years that Nelson Mandela spent in South African prisons. In a segregated northern US suburb, my mother fought racism, in part, by forming a social organization called “Friends Unlimited.” A group of families and individuals of different “races” would get together for picnics and barbeques, and the parents would have cocktail parties together. When I became a political activist in college, I looked back on this as an empty middle-class suburban gesture—lacking any real political edge, critique, or import. But since then I have come to see the quiet power of my mother’s initiative. It was not enough, of course, by itself. It didn’t dismantle institutionalized racism or address the fact the most of the poor who lived nearby were either black or Puerto Rican. It didn’t even begin to address economic injustice. But in the circle of “friends unlimited,” I and my brothers learned to honor and respect all the people in our lives: African American, Korean, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran as well as white. We listened to their stories and became different people than we would have been without them. And they became different people than they would have been without us. In time, I was moved to learn more about the connections between our middle-class US suburb and Nelson Mandela’s South African prison. In fact, I ended up devoting my life to learning and teaching about such connections.

Perhaps Mount Holyoke has been your own version of Friends Unlimited: a place where you deepened your connections with some people whose lives and life circumstances are quite different from your own. Where will you take what you have gained from that?

You will sort that out in time. But lay the foundation now by taking time to appreciate the ways you have seen to all kinds of relationships while you have been here: with roommates, classmates, fellow dining service workers; with parents, grandparents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles, friends from home. Appreciate yourselves for stopping to talk with the person who cleaned your dorm, for remembering to say “thank you,” from time to time, to the people who cooked your meals, processed your financial aid, or arranged your course packets. Your accomplishment has not only been academic, artistic, athletic, and such; it has also been, fundamentally, human.

So, let your celebration be a beginning. Carry it with you. Let it be the unpatented seed from which our common humanity can grow and flourish.