What Angela Davis did not say at Bryn Mawr
To the Times: Recently I attended the graduation of a friend’s daughter at Bryn Mawr College, where Angela Davis was the commencement speaker. True to form, she truly represented the progressive left in her rhetoric. She touched on white supremacy and white privilege, and the white male patriarchal society. She talked about the prison industrial complex and racism, as well as eradicating the gender binary, and I thought, “And replace it with what?” She mentioned the statues that had to come down and exploitative capitalism.
As an African-American social worker, what saddened me at the end of her speech is not so much what she said but what Angela Davis did not say. She did not tell these graduating Millennials, predominantly white and disproportionately Asian, that they live in the greatest country on earth and are so privileged to be receiving degrees including graduate and postgraduate degrees, not because of their race or gender but because they had embraced a set of values that prioritize education and responded to the opportunity to achieve this education.
She did not tell them that thousands of their fellow citizens in these same United States are not so privileged. Many are trapped in failing public schools and will end up being high school dropouts and never experience the “Pomp and Circumstance” of a graduation. Many are not able to read, and some will end up in the prisons, functional illiterates, products of the prison industrial complex but not because of racism.
She did not tell these Millennials that the greatest threat to women is not a white male patriarchal society, but the explosion of single motherhood in our cities, where men abandon the children they father, leaving the women to soldier on against all odds. She did not tell them that if they would dare to take public transportation in Philadelphia, they would often see mothers their age, juggling a stroller with a baby and one or two other children in tow, trying to get on or off the bus or trolley. If you were to ask me, these women and children are the true victims, not the graduating Millennials.
She didn’t mention the black-onblack crimes in Chicago where, as someone recently said, “Fatherless blacks are killing other fatherless blacks” She did not tell them about the success sequence, an antidote to poverty (high school diploma, a job, marriage, and then children) that George Will reminded us of in the Washington Post recently. She did not say as Winston Churchill did, decades ago, that capitalism, as imperfect as it is, remains the best economic system known to mankind, and the best to lift people out of poverty. Neither did she tell these graduating Millennials that the smart phones that they cannot live without is one of the greatest geniuses of capitalism and the free market system.
If Angela Davis had said any of the above, perhaps some of the graduating Millennials may have thought “Wow! I am blessed and privileged. Is there a single mother I can help? Is there a child I can tutor or a myriad of other things that would cause them to look beyond themselves?” Instead, her commencement speech fed them the same diet many have received the previous four or more years in school, and they left the graduating ceremony no different than when they arrived. Patricia Jackson, Upper Darby