hi everyone thanks for having me so let
me share a quote the arc of the moral
universe is long but it bends toward
justice I’m sure many of us have heard
this quote before it is attributed to
the Unitarian minister and
transcendentalist Theodore Parker thank
you and has been kept alive in popular
memory partly by Martin Luther King jr.
maybe a little well known man and more
recently by 44th US President Barack
Obama who had the quote woven into a rug
in the Oval Office as a reminder now I
hope you’ll humor me in a little bit of
cynicism I promise it’s not aimless
hopefully but a productive starting
point I’d like to humbly disagree with
this idea maybe not the idea itself but
rather the idea or maybe how we
interpret this quote we seem to dwell on
the idea that justice is inevitable but
I think the part of the statement that
is more pressing is that the journey to
justice is long it’s over the past two
years or so with recent events we’ve
been hearing a lot of talk about how
things are worse than they’ve been in a
long time gusts of violence extremism
and egoism are blowing across the globe
human lives are being snuffed daily and
there’s little time to process before
the next act of senseless violence and
for different reasons folks seem to want
to return to some version of the recent
or distant past a time that supposedly
humanity was braked I’m feeling a little
confused about this personally I’m 24
years old I haven’t been around all that
long but in my lifetime and in reading
about times before mine I really
struggle to recall true lasting moments
of greatness in human history times that
it would be desirable to return to her
emulate today perhaps my perspective is
impacted by some of the events that have
marked my coming of age I went to
university in the fall of 2012 just as
the black lives matter movement was
picking up steam earlier that year 17
year-old Trayvon Martin was on his way
home from buying snacks at the store
when he was fatally shot by a
neighborhood vigilante this vigilante a
member of neighborhood watch should
identify Trayvon as suspicious
he accosted him and well we all know how
that ended earlier that or a year
earlier I sat in my sister’s apartment
right over there as news broke of a
terrorist attack at the government
office quarters in Norway in the capital
city Oslo it was a hot summer’s day in
the middle of July my parents and I were
visiting her and we had the windows open
to let the breeze pass through the
ground-floor apartment as soon as the
news broke we shut the windows drew the
blinds and my parent started to look at
flights terrorists was a code word for a
brown person an immigrant and we were
stuck in a strange limbo state of
feeling devastated over what had
happened but also very aware that we
might be lumped into the category of
perpetrator about 40 minutes later when
the terrorists arrived at the youth camp
for the Labor Party and opened fire and
a group of politically engaged young
people he was suddenly labeled a lone
wolf at that moment we knew he was what
they call ethnically Norwegian I’m quite
certain that few white Norwegians
started to draw their blinds and create
escape plans because they shared certain
social characteristics with the
terrorists
but going even further back the first
major event that shook my understanding
of my place in the world was the murder
of a 15 year old ganya Norwegian boy
called Benjamin Tomlinson On January 26
2001 in the Oslo neighborhood of Halle
Millia Benjamin and a friend were
standing outside a grocery store when
two men exited a car and ran toward them
Benjamin tried to escape but he was
caught and stabbed to death by two men
who were later found to be members of a
neo-nazi group these are some of the big
moments the ones that made the news
around the time of Benjamin’s murder
I myself was experiencing the daily
macro and micro aggressions of being a
immigrant kid of color in a
predominantly white country I recall
being somewhere between the ages of 6
and 7 when the concepts of racism
xenophobia were introduced into my
vocabulary these were the days when my
school days began to be peppered by a
monkey chance and go back to Africa and
unexpected bursts of violence that left
me feeling angry confused but mostly sad
in the years since I’ve become quite
concerned with how kids and young people
particularly those whose identities fall
outside the frames of so-called dominant
cultures
are forced to grow up quickly they grow
up quickly because they learn early on
about prejudice what it means to be
hated or feared not based on your
actions but rather by default to contend
with unearned pain and try to make an
easy peace with it to see humanity and
people who see none in you to forgive
people who later repent of these
behaviors either blaming youth or
ignorance I’ve been that kid and I often
wonder what about the innocence of
children who early on learned to look
hate in the face and not let their
hearts be hardened by it our our
childhoods not sacred these events and
experiences have led me to hold a
healthy degree of skepticism about
social change and how we so rarely
managed to really create and maintain it
in a lasting sense anyway my mother
often quotes a certain biblical
scripture there’s nothing new Under the
Sun and as a student of history it’s
clear that global events and the popular
attitudes that give rise to them very
much exist in historical context and
have deep social and cultural roots I
think that in order for us to become
more effective changemakers we have to
accept that we haven’t quite managed to
create a world that we can be proud of
and we have to address another problem
that we as human beings have this need
to feel hopeful and happy about what
we’ve achieved and that we often feel
more concerned about the symbolism list
and of actually doing the hard work that
is required to make the world better one
of my favorite writers Tallahassee
Coates calls this a hope and earned we
place a lot of this hope on young people
the next generation is always going to
make things better
young people are magic unicorns who by
virtue of their youth are just more
progressive and you know poised for this
task than the people who raised them and
taught them how to see the world
struggle becomes glamorized as a form of
youthful rebellion particularly to
people whose lives would be ok if that
you really chose not to engage at all
and when it loses its glamour and it’s
time to grow up they abandon the
struggle and re-enter civilized society
their egos may have grown but little has
actually changed in the world and this
is partly because we don’t talk enough
about the greatest truth
about striving for freedom and justice
that as Nelson Mandela once said it is a
long long walk that being an activist or
an ally is really not about self
aggrandizement but about putting your
body and your soul where your politics
are an uncomfortable process and as a
result marginalized groups whose
everyday lives and longevity depend on
it are forced to bear the lifelong
mantle of making the world better
now obviously I’m speaking in general
isms to make a point we have had moments
that have changed things for the better
I wouldn’t be standing here if we didn’t
but again these changes are not the
result of fate but of decisive action of
people who belong to long traditions of
activism demanding changes both in laws
and in popular attitudes bringing them
into the consciousness of everyday
people as well as the political and
economic elite they have to disturb our
understanding of the world and of
progress as we know it this is what the
various branches of the mid twentieth
century US civil rights movements from
the movements for rights for people of
colors for the women’s movements were
doing with their marches and protests
their direct descendants are movements
like black lives matter and Danai gurira
as love our girls tirana burke with her
me too movement showing that we have a
ways to go yet when it comes to ending
sexual violence dr. Martin Luther King
jr. again has been so deeply remembered
that many forget he was his work for
about toward raising consciousness about
him justice made him one of the most
reviled men in his country and
distrusted by people around the world a
person who’s been teaching me a lot
about my own privilege is a guy named
graduate student by the name of wound
penny Fatima to Muhammad she’s from the
de gamba ethnic group in northern Ghana
and she challenges the idea that Ghanian
identity is synonymous with a con or
southern Ghanaian identity and she
encourages a con ghanians like myself to
acknowledge that we benefit from a
cultural and political hegemony and
advocates for creating a ghanian society
where all ethnic groups are properly
respected and represented it’s because
of people like those I mentioned deny
Tirana of course MLK and one penny that
progress is made they actively engaged
to sway the arc of the moral universe
toward justice understanding progress as
a verb present tense we do it now but
recent events of
shown that under the veneer of progress
things remain pretty ugly that doesn’t
mean the world is any worse than it’s
ever been more likely than anything it
simply is what it’s always been the ills
of the past simply reappear in new
perhaps perhaps less overtly threatening
forms I return to that scripture so
often quoted by my mother there’s
nothing new Under the Sun the mere
passage of time does not naturally
change popular attitudes nor does the
passing of laws and the idea that we can
sit idly by and expect progress to
happen or engage superficially is
unrealistic and worse yet it’s really
quite irresponsible so thank you for
coming with me on that journey of doom
and gloom but I want to talk a little
bit about what we can also do to become
active loving relentless agents of
change because I know people in this
room care about that we can create a
context in which the arc of the moral
universe does actively bend toward
justice but that requires us to be
willing to do the hard hard work that
that entails and not only idealistic
young people because we have that burden
put on us a lot but we need
intergenerational social justice work
that is intersectional in nature that
operates from the understanding that
many of the ills were working against
are intersected from xenophobia to
gender inequality to imperialism to a
lack of regard for the environment this
means that children and young people
from marginalized backgrounds cannot be
expected to bear the burden of change
for those of us who are parents or one
day aspire to be whether we all have
privileges in some form we have to make
sure that we explain to our children but
they are not the default in any society
where we belong to a dominant culture
that they are not more normal than
anyone else and they they don’t have
very they don’t have a right to exert
any form of violence physical or
otherwise because something is
unfamiliar we have to keep in mind that
when we spare the innocence of any child
it often comes at the cost of that of
another I desperately want to feel
hopeful even though that may not come
across I know many of my peers
particularly those whose identities fall
outside the frames of so-called normalcy
who already feel as though they’ve done
a lifetime worth of activist work feel
we want the movements of our time to be
more than mere moments trends people
jump on and dump once the fad is over we
need there to be an understanding that
our world has never in its history been
great that doesn’t mean that we can’t be
great but achieving this will require
work introspective individual work as
well as intentional collaborative work
the kind of work that is uncomfortable
time-consuming and cuts into every
sphere of society that requires a deep
understanding of history and the
understanding that everything is
political every single stance is
political people have with the help of
conventions oriented all their solutions
toward the easiest side of easy but it
is clear that we must hold to what is
difficult this quote by Rainer Maria
Rilke I think describes how we often
approach social change we speak of
systems enacting structural violence but
how often do we stop to think of
ourselves as pieces of those systems
imagine if each of us committed to doing
the hard personal work of addressing our
personal biases and behaviors didn’t
point fingers at abstract systems but
bold they acknowledged our stakes in
them and did what was needed to
dismantle them I think that we might
begin to knock on the door of greatness
thank you for taking some time to listen
to my my ramblings of millennial Dredd
I’d like to share a few verses of a song
with you that’s okay it’s called
questions and it’s by a Nigerian French
singer called Asha tell me how many
women’s childhood dreams come to pass
tell me how many movies turned out real
there are so many questions questions I
like to ask so you can understand
exactly our fear tell me how many people
wish they were someone else
some of they think the world wants them
to be tell me how many baby
we’ll be born just to die leaving me
with these questions asking why how do
people get so busy they don’t find time
to love was the truth behind why people
go to war why is there so much religion
and yet so little love will I ever get
to know the truth someday where’s the
youth is gonna dare where’s the alto
really cares why do people believe
things they know aren’t true when you
look into the mirror who do you see why
do we have to grow to be wise thank you [Applause]
me share a quote the arc of the moral
universe is long but it bends toward
justice I’m sure many of us have heard
this quote before it is attributed to
the Unitarian minister and
transcendentalist Theodore Parker thank
you and has been kept alive in popular
memory partly by Martin Luther King jr.
maybe a little well known man and more
recently by 44th US President Barack
Obama who had the quote woven into a rug
in the Oval Office as a reminder now I
hope you’ll humor me in a little bit of
cynicism I promise it’s not aimless
hopefully but a productive starting
point I’d like to humbly disagree with
this idea maybe not the idea itself but
rather the idea or maybe how we
interpret this quote we seem to dwell on
the idea that justice is inevitable but
I think the part of the statement that
is more pressing is that the journey to
justice is long it’s over the past two
years or so with recent events we’ve
been hearing a lot of talk about how
things are worse than they’ve been in a
long time gusts of violence extremism
and egoism are blowing across the globe
human lives are being snuffed daily and
there’s little time to process before
the next act of senseless violence and
for different reasons folks seem to want
to return to some version of the recent
or distant past a time that supposedly
humanity was braked I’m feeling a little
confused about this personally I’m 24
years old I haven’t been around all that
long but in my lifetime and in reading
about times before mine I really
struggle to recall true lasting moments
of greatness in human history times that
it would be desirable to return to her
emulate today perhaps my perspective is
impacted by some of the events that have
marked my coming of age I went to
university in the fall of 2012 just as
the black lives matter movement was
picking up steam earlier that year 17
year-old Trayvon Martin was on his way
home from buying snacks at the store
when he was fatally shot by a
neighborhood vigilante this vigilante a
member of neighborhood watch should
identify Trayvon as suspicious
he accosted him and well we all know how
that ended earlier that or a year
earlier I sat in my sister’s apartment
right over there as news broke of a
terrorist attack at the government
office quarters in Norway in the capital
city Oslo it was a hot summer’s day in
the middle of July my parents and I were
visiting her and we had the windows open
to let the breeze pass through the
ground-floor apartment as soon as the
news broke we shut the windows drew the
blinds and my parent started to look at
flights terrorists was a code word for a
brown person an immigrant and we were
stuck in a strange limbo state of
feeling devastated over what had
happened but also very aware that we
might be lumped into the category of
perpetrator about 40 minutes later when
the terrorists arrived at the youth camp
for the Labor Party and opened fire and
a group of politically engaged young
people he was suddenly labeled a lone
wolf at that moment we knew he was what
they call ethnically Norwegian I’m quite
certain that few white Norwegians
started to draw their blinds and create
escape plans because they shared certain
social characteristics with the
terrorists
but going even further back the first
major event that shook my understanding
of my place in the world was the murder
of a 15 year old ganya Norwegian boy
called Benjamin Tomlinson On January 26
2001 in the Oslo neighborhood of Halle
Millia Benjamin and a friend were
standing outside a grocery store when
two men exited a car and ran toward them
Benjamin tried to escape but he was
caught and stabbed to death by two men
who were later found to be members of a
neo-nazi group these are some of the big
moments the ones that made the news
around the time of Benjamin’s murder
I myself was experiencing the daily
macro and micro aggressions of being a
immigrant kid of color in a
predominantly white country I recall
being somewhere between the ages of 6
and 7 when the concepts of racism
xenophobia were introduced into my
vocabulary these were the days when my
school days began to be peppered by a
monkey chance and go back to Africa and
unexpected bursts of violence that left
me feeling angry confused but mostly sad
in the years since I’ve become quite
concerned with how kids and young people
particularly those whose identities fall
outside the frames of so-called dominant
cultures
are forced to grow up quickly they grow
up quickly because they learn early on
about prejudice what it means to be
hated or feared not based on your
actions but rather by default to contend
with unearned pain and try to make an
easy peace with it to see humanity and
people who see none in you to forgive
people who later repent of these
behaviors either blaming youth or
ignorance I’ve been that kid and I often
wonder what about the innocence of
children who early on learned to look
hate in the face and not let their
hearts be hardened by it our our
childhoods not sacred these events and
experiences have led me to hold a
healthy degree of skepticism about
social change and how we so rarely
managed to really create and maintain it
in a lasting sense anyway my mother
often quotes a certain biblical
scripture there’s nothing new Under the
Sun and as a student of history it’s
clear that global events and the popular
attitudes that give rise to them very
much exist in historical context and
have deep social and cultural roots I
think that in order for us to become
more effective changemakers we have to
accept that we haven’t quite managed to
create a world that we can be proud of
and we have to address another problem
that we as human beings have this need
to feel hopeful and happy about what
we’ve achieved and that we often feel
more concerned about the symbolism list
and of actually doing the hard work that
is required to make the world better one
of my favorite writers Tallahassee
Coates calls this a hope and earned we
place a lot of this hope on young people
the next generation is always going to
make things better
young people are magic unicorns who by
virtue of their youth are just more
progressive and you know poised for this
task than the people who raised them and
taught them how to see the world
struggle becomes glamorized as a form of
youthful rebellion particularly to
people whose lives would be ok if that
you really chose not to engage at all
and when it loses its glamour and it’s
time to grow up they abandon the
struggle and re-enter civilized society
their egos may have grown but little has
actually changed in the world and this
is partly because we don’t talk enough
about the greatest truth
about striving for freedom and justice
that as Nelson Mandela once said it is a
long long walk that being an activist or
an ally is really not about self
aggrandizement but about putting your
body and your soul where your politics
are an uncomfortable process and as a
result marginalized groups whose
everyday lives and longevity depend on
it are forced to bear the lifelong
mantle of making the world better
now obviously I’m speaking in general
isms to make a point we have had moments
that have changed things for the better
I wouldn’t be standing here if we didn’t
but again these changes are not the
result of fate but of decisive action of
people who belong to long traditions of
activism demanding changes both in laws
and in popular attitudes bringing them
into the consciousness of everyday
people as well as the political and
economic elite they have to disturb our
understanding of the world and of
progress as we know it this is what the
various branches of the mid twentieth
century US civil rights movements from
the movements for rights for people of
colors for the women’s movements were
doing with their marches and protests
their direct descendants are movements
like black lives matter and Danai gurira
as love our girls tirana burke with her
me too movement showing that we have a
ways to go yet when it comes to ending
sexual violence dr. Martin Luther King
jr. again has been so deeply remembered
that many forget he was his work for
about toward raising consciousness about
him justice made him one of the most
reviled men in his country and
distrusted by people around the world a
person who’s been teaching me a lot
about my own privilege is a guy named
graduate student by the name of wound
penny Fatima to Muhammad she’s from the
de gamba ethnic group in northern Ghana
and she challenges the idea that Ghanian
identity is synonymous with a con or
southern Ghanaian identity and she
encourages a con ghanians like myself to
acknowledge that we benefit from a
cultural and political hegemony and
advocates for creating a ghanian society
where all ethnic groups are properly
respected and represented it’s because
of people like those I mentioned deny
Tirana of course MLK and one penny that
progress is made they actively engaged
to sway the arc of the moral universe
toward justice understanding progress as
a verb present tense we do it now but
recent events of
shown that under the veneer of progress
things remain pretty ugly that doesn’t
mean the world is any worse than it’s
ever been more likely than anything it
simply is what it’s always been the ills
of the past simply reappear in new
perhaps perhaps less overtly threatening
forms I return to that scripture so
often quoted by my mother there’s
nothing new Under the Sun the mere
passage of time does not naturally
change popular attitudes nor does the
passing of laws and the idea that we can
sit idly by and expect progress to
happen or engage superficially is
unrealistic and worse yet it’s really
quite irresponsible so thank you for
coming with me on that journey of doom
and gloom but I want to talk a little
bit about what we can also do to become
active loving relentless agents of
change because I know people in this
room care about that we can create a
context in which the arc of the moral
universe does actively bend toward
justice but that requires us to be
willing to do the hard hard work that
that entails and not only idealistic
young people because we have that burden
put on us a lot but we need
intergenerational social justice work
that is intersectional in nature that
operates from the understanding that
many of the ills were working against
are intersected from xenophobia to
gender inequality to imperialism to a
lack of regard for the environment this
means that children and young people
from marginalized backgrounds cannot be
expected to bear the burden of change
for those of us who are parents or one
day aspire to be whether we all have
privileges in some form we have to make
sure that we explain to our children but
they are not the default in any society
where we belong to a dominant culture
that they are not more normal than
anyone else and they they don’t have
very they don’t have a right to exert
any form of violence physical or
otherwise because something is
unfamiliar we have to keep in mind that
when we spare the innocence of any child
it often comes at the cost of that of
another I desperately want to feel
hopeful even though that may not come
across I know many of my peers
particularly those whose identities fall
outside the frames of so-called normalcy
who already feel as though they’ve done
a lifetime worth of activist work feel
we want the movements of our time to be
more than mere moments trends people
jump on and dump once the fad is over we
need there to be an understanding that
our world has never in its history been
great that doesn’t mean that we can’t be
great but achieving this will require
work introspective individual work as
well as intentional collaborative work
the kind of work that is uncomfortable
time-consuming and cuts into every
sphere of society that requires a deep
understanding of history and the
understanding that everything is
political every single stance is
political people have with the help of
conventions oriented all their solutions
toward the easiest side of easy but it
is clear that we must hold to what is
difficult this quote by Rainer Maria
Rilke I think describes how we often
approach social change we speak of
systems enacting structural violence but
how often do we stop to think of
ourselves as pieces of those systems
imagine if each of us committed to doing
the hard personal work of addressing our
personal biases and behaviors didn’t
point fingers at abstract systems but
bold they acknowledged our stakes in
them and did what was needed to
dismantle them I think that we might
begin to knock on the door of greatness
thank you for taking some time to listen
to my my ramblings of millennial Dredd
I’d like to share a few verses of a song
with you that’s okay it’s called
questions and it’s by a Nigerian French
singer called Asha tell me how many
women’s childhood dreams come to pass
tell me how many movies turned out real
there are so many questions questions I
like to ask so you can understand
exactly our fear tell me how many people
wish they were someone else
some of they think the world wants them
to be tell me how many baby
we’ll be born just to die leaving me
with these questions asking why how do
people get so busy they don’t find time
to love was the truth behind why people
go to war why is there so much religion
and yet so little love will I ever get
to know the truth someday where’s the
youth is gonna dare where’s the alto
really cares why do people believe
things they know aren’t true when you
look into the mirror who do you see why
do we have to grow to be wise thank you [Applause]
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