Thank you very much for that very kind introduction and this warm welcome. Mr. President, members of the board of trustees, members of the faculty, my fellow honoraries and most especially, members of the Class of 1999 (applause). Each of us standing in an arena such as this, participating in a ritual such as this, got here by the grace of God and with the help of a mentor or two. So before I begin, let us give applause to those who made each of your triumphs possible, and I'm speaking of course, member of the class, of the parents of the class of 1999, so let's give it up for our parents.
You know if you think about it this has got to be a very happy day for your parents, because anytime they can save $30,000 a year and get their children finally to leave home for good has got to be a happy day. So sit back and enjoy, because I promise I'll be brief because no one ever remembers a commencement speaker. I don't even remember my commencement speaker.
Twenty-five years ago I too graduated from college. Twenty-five years ago – you know, the invitation to deliver this commencement speech to the class of 1999 has given me a midlife crisis like you would not believe. Because I can still remember when I graduated. Now you have to imagine me 25 years ago -- a two foot high Afro, a dashiki lurking beneath my gown, a clenched fist black power salute during the ceremony, those were the days my friend, those were the days, the good old days of wild west revolution even at Yale University. Twenty-five years ago. Now my calendar is flooded with commencement speeches. Why do you get to be a commencement speaker only when they figure that you're too old to remember what commencement was like?
You know I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that America had passed from adolescence to senility without ever having experienced adulthood. Well that may be broadly true of Americans generally but it's not such a bad thing if you think about it. The adolescent is trying to find himself or herself according to the cliché, and once you find yourself what are you supposed to do? Well, you're supposed to get yourself laminated, laced with sodium benzoate to preserve whoever it was that you decided you were when you were in college, over the next few decades of your life. Now that by custom is what we call adulthood in this country, and also by custom a university education is the ideal right of passage to this venerable end. But in fact if you think about it, college has always served as a crucible where difference and commonality clash and collide and overcome. You see, it goes against common sense for some people to be told that you have to learn and relearn your ethnic, or religious, or social identity. That is, how to be black or how to be white, how to be Jewish or how to be Christian, how to be gay or how to be straight.
At Yale I was secretary of something called the B.S.A.Y., Black Student Association at Yale, but I remember my first year there, attending my very first meeting of this group. But most of all I remember the great trepidation that I experienced as a transplant from the back hills of Appalachia in the company of these largely urban new Negroes. People black and smart and elegant and from elsewhere with a capital E. See, if you're from a small town there are only two places in the universe --the valley and elsewhere with a capital E, and these brothers definitely were not from Piedmont, West Virginia. Now this was a group with a definite sense of what was and what was not ostensibly black as we used to put it in the 60's, jockeying for position by being blacker than thou. Well, filing out after two hours of experiencing the greatest fear and trepidation that I ever experienced, certainly in a political rally, I turned to a new friend, a man named Linwood, a black man from North Carolina who is now a very prominent cardiac surgeon, and I asked Linwood whether he too had experienced that fear and trembling that I had experienced, whether he too had found it hard to fit in. And I'll never forget what he responded to me. 'Skip,' he said, shaking his head sadly at all the posturing we had seen in that meeting, 'I don't know about you but I've been black my whole life.' It was as if a great load had been lifted from my shoulders.
You know, I should explain that the village in which I had grown up, up the Potomac River about two hours west of DC, was essentially a segregated village. It was an Irish and Italian papermill town. I'll never forget when Brown versus Board was 1954 they integrated schools, and our school integrated in 1955. I started school a year later in 1956, and my father called me in to see him about a week before school started, and we sat down and he said, 'boy you're going over to that white school,' as we called it, 'and there's an important thing you have to understand,' and I said "what's that Daddy?" He said well, there are two kinds of white people, and I said, "Two kinds of white people?" He said yup, and I said, how do you tell the difference? He said that's easy, the two kinds are the Irish and the Italian, and this is how you tell the difference. He said the Irish have names that begin with 'o' and the Italians have names that end with 'o.' And that, ladies and gentlemen, I want to confess here, is the secret to my success all these years later.
You see it was my generation that saw all the sweeping changes that were associated wi
