On May 18, Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee addressed the 2016 Hopkins graduating class at the Royal Farms Arena and received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. Director of “Do the Right Thing,” Lee was recognized for his achievements as a filmmaker and for other contributions he has made to American culture.
“Wake up,” he told the room more than once, reading from a text that was often edgy and sometimes threatening. He pointed out that in a few decades, the majority race in the U.S. is projected to be African-American. He implied that if events were not satisfactory to this new majority, racial conflict would exceed what we are experiencing now. He read the lyrics from Prince’s song “Baltimore,” written shortly after the death of Freddie Gray and the riots that followed in April 2015, which include the sword-rattling refrain “If there ain’t no justice there ain’t no peace.”
A certain in-your-face hostility pervaded Lee’s text. Most of the comments posted to the Hopkins “Hub” website were negative. Attendees and online viewers noted that Lee had left the stage immediately after his talk, something that’s not usually done by commencement speakers; that he repeatedly omitted the “s” from our founder’s name, which is done more often than you would think, though not at Hopkins commencements; and that he used the F-word, formulated as the interrogatory “WTF”.
Though none of these departures from academic tradition particularly bothered me, I was taken back when Lee said: “It’s up to the classes of 2016 to make a better world for the 99 percent.”
The fact is, the best colleges and universities in the country are bending over backwards now to admit and support black students who appear to have the capacity and drive to do the required work. Nonetheless many black students who attend these schools are having trouble academically and socially. At Hopkins last fall, demonstrators made it clear that they do not feel welcome at the Homewood Campus. They blame their isolation on the fact that there are not enough faces like their own and on “racism,” which they claim persists among students and faculty. Although The Johns Hopkins News-Letter covered the demonstrations and subsequent meetings of black students with university administrators in great detail, no incidents of racism were documented.
I believe that the real causes of black students’ discontent remain unacknowledged and unreported. No one wants to uncover this truth or to speak it. Academic administrators avoid going too deeply into campus racial issues for fear of losing their jobs, as happened last fall when the president of the University of Missouri was forced to resign. On college campuses, the search for truth has largely been replaced by an effort to be “politically correct” at any cost, in the hope that no one will be offended (or fired). The downside of political correctness is that what is politically correct is usually otherwise bogus.
Many black students insist that their problems originate in the predominantly white institutions they attend. Ironically, the common ground that these institutions are attempting to create for all students may be what the protesters are actually resisting and rejecting. Perhaps this is because black students are not sure enough of their own identities to join a white culture that has historically betrayed them. If this truth can’t be acknowledged in America’s academic communities — where freedom of speech and the search for truth have, until recently, been valued above everything else — how will it ever be known?
My vision of America’s future is grimmer than Spike Lee’s. If we — the classes of 2016, the presidents of these colleges and universities and anyone in this country who has influence over events — continue to deny the realities of what it means for black and white Americans to learn, work and live side by side and instead clench fists and make threats, we will find ourselves in a world that no American, black or white, will be able to live in.
In the demonstrations at Homewood last fall, there was no violence or destruction of property and no faculty members lost their jobs. This outcome says a good deal about the stability of an institution that long ago set the standard for graduate study in the U.S. The question is, can Hopkins once again take the lead by authentically embracing the complex and difficult realities that underlie the problems that so many black students are experiencing now in colleges and universities where they are the minority?
The “better world” that Spike Lee asked us for in his address can happen only if those who have been historically shortchanged are willing to become part of an American common culture. This would mean living in the present, while being open to the possibilities of a better future in what is gradually becoming a fairer society.
René J. Muller is a Johns Hopkins alumnus and the author of Doing Psychiatry Wrong and Psych ER.
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