Who Benefits from Ignoring Poverty and Race?
In his spring 2013 commencement address at Morehouse College, Barack Obama offered a compelling message:
Obama said he was lucky to have his mother and grandparents, who raised him, and said that under different circumstances, he could have ended up in prison or unemployed.‘I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family — and that motivates me,’ he said.While he urged graduates to not use race as an excuse for their failures, he acknowledged that the ‘bitter legacy’ of discrimination still exists in America.‘At some point in life as an African American you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by,’ he said.
Coming from the first African American president in the U.S., this call for personal grit and refusing to make excuses speaks to a central narrative