Commencement
Good Evening, friends, faculty, family, graduates and my colleagues: graduates of
Spring 2014. It is a privilege for each of us to be in this position today; as we all
were accepted into college, and today we bear witness to years of our perseverance,
hard work, and diligence. Credit is due not just to us but those in attendance:
families, friends and faculty. Therefore graduates, please stand and applaud your
supporters.
As for me, I thank my God, Jehovah, for His guidance and tender mercies, as He has
been my strength throughout the course of my college career. For 4 ½ years I have
been away from home, AWAY FROM HOME, and while it is certainly easy to lose
focus and get lost in mundane pursuits, maintaining a relationship with God has
kept me vigilant and focused, thus making my education my sole objective.
Secondly, I thank the support of my family who has been there to encourage and
uplift me when I wanted to sleep instead of study, when I wanted to sleep instead of
attend class and when I wanted to sleep instead of completing assignments. As you
can probably tell, we the students of the Africana Studies Department have gone
through too many sleepless nights; however, it has not been in vain. It has helped
build our character and prepare us for a more unforgiving and demanding
professional system and structure.
Furthermore, I’d like to thank my mom who has kept me fed by always allowing me
to grocery shop from the house and bring whatever I needed out of her pantry to my
fridge in Albany. I thank you for listening to my usual rants and reminding me to
persevere in prayer, and assuring me that everything would be all right. To my
sister Crystal, whose Igbo name is Chinwe, which means, God owns-you are a
blessing; thank you for being you.
As we are here to acknowledge, celebrate and honor the graduates of the Africana
Studies Department, I would like to give attention to why we have dedicated four or
more years to the study, a study that is widely underappreciated, thus underfunded
and sometimes disregarded by institutions alike. Often when degrees are bestowed
to students at like ceremonies, whether it be for Business, Economics or Biology, we
are confident in their future and the opportunities that such programs promise. We
assume that more popular programs yield a more secure and stable career. Africana
studies is no less valuable. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is value in learning
about why our schools bear the appearance of calculated unfairness, why mass
incarceration is a well-disguised system of racialized social control that largely affects
our men, and why post-colonial Africa remains “developing” since its independence.
Learning this is the catalyst for change. We are the men and women who will teach
your children, thus reversing the psychologies that have affected their psyches, we
are the men and women who will mentor and advise our youth, and we are the men
and women who are committed to changing our communities.
So whatever doubt or uncertainty you may have had for an Africana Studies major,
with us, it is well. I know for some of my colleagues, we are moving on to become
educators and some, on to earning their PH.D. We are the products of this
Department.
I want to end this by giving special thanks to the professors in the Department for
giving us new knowledge that sharpens or changes our mentalities. Thank you for
maintaining this department despite challenges.
May we, the graduates of 2014, grow into the products that this environment
produces: scholars, educators, and community servers.
Ashley Okonkwo