It’s commencement season. Yet amid conservative complaints about liberal dominance of the commencement industry, some speeches have reverberated with conservative ideas. That was no more evident than when Michelle Obama took the opportunity to reiterate more of her husband’s politics of black respectability at Bowie State University.
She told the audience at the historically black college’s graduation last week that the focus on education had been lost by a community with a history in which slaves had risked their lives to learn to read. She spoke of the struggles to integrate America’s schools. But those words were a mere setup to yet again demonizing and pathologizing today’s black youth. “Instead of walking miles every day to school,” she said, “they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.”
Reducing educational success to choices and blaming dropout rates on false dreams, such claims are a disservice to struggles for justice. Worse, the presumption is that one choice is good and rational, and the other pathological and irrational. The idea that dreaming of a career in hip-hop or athletics doesn’t prepare one to succeed in law or politics is problematic.
The first lady’s shaming message, praising the power of educational bootstraps, echoed her husband’s. At a 2009 speech before the NAACP, President Obama urged the African-American community to take better advantage of education’s equalizing potential. Irrespective of racism, inequality, or segregation, education was the ticket to freedom and prosperity. Urging students to stay in school and keep up their grades, he said, “No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that.” He wanted students “aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers.”
If only it were that easy.
While the path to colleges is littered with school closures, the hegemony of the testing culture, and divestment from public education—pushing youth of color into the school-to-prison pipeline—the percentage of African-Americans attending colleges and universities is on the rise. That’s no thanks to President Obama, whose administration’s educational policy has done little to rectify persistent inequalities. The rising costs of higher education and the administration’s position on student loans have made it more difficult for African-American families, disproportionately hurt by the recession, to send their kids to college. Still, African-Americans are attending colleges and universities at record levels. Why not celebrate this reality?
The Obamas’ update of the “Moynihan Report” (1965), which identified single-parented homes and a culture of poverty as key factors in persistent inequality, almost always takes place in front of African-American audiences. The continuation of a politics of respectability, in which the black middle class has criticized the black poor for lacking the values needed to “move the race forward,” has been put on full display by the Obamas.
Paisley Jane Harris, discussing the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who first described the term “politics of respectability,” identifies it as part of “uplift politics,” which “had two audiences: African-Americans, who were encouraged to be respectable, and white people, who needed to be shown that African-Americans could be respectable.” It involved the “promotion of temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual purity. The politics of respectability entailed ‘reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform.’”
As with this larger history, white America was a primary audience for Michelle Obama’s commencement speech. That audience invariably finds comfort in speeches that simultaneously blame African-Americans for persistent inequality while celebrating American exceptionalism.
The “postracial” president, hoops fanatic, and BFF of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, slamming ballers and rappers? Hmm. But worse than the irony is the cynical political calculation, the failure to acknowledge the ways society has left African-American youth behind while blaming them for lagging. “Are personal accountability, motivation, and fear of being teased really the biggest causes of dropout rates?” asks Racquel Gates, an assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island. “It certainly couldn’t be outdated textbooks, shortage of pencils and school supplies, overworked teachers, lack of college preparatory materials, etc.”
I am less concerned with the political rhetoric and the clichés than with the links between word and action, between rhetoric and policy. The focus on choices and aspirations, on dreams and values, obscures the ways that educational policies, institutional choices, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the criminalization of adolescence (see, for instance, the case of Kiera Wilmot), are killing the dreams of black youth. The closure of schools more than Jeezy’s bling, the lack of well-paying jobs more than LeBron’s cars, and the “race to the bottom” and the wait for superman, more than Shaq’s and Dwight’s cribs, are the true enemies of justice and educational equality.
It would be nice to hear that in a commencement speech.
David J. Leonard is an associate professor and chair of the department of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University.
