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Dear 2008 graduates…

Posted in Speeches, Irshaddering Thoughts on May 18, 2008

2008 graduating class of NYU’s School of Public Service

On a rainy morning, in the gorgeous Brooklyn Academy of Music, hundreds of students gathered to celebrate their graduation from New York University’s School of Public Service.  

I had the privilege of addressing them. My aim: to be honest about what they’re getting into when the politics of social justice can get downright nasty. It’s one thing to inspire. Quite another to romanticize. I wanted to do the former without resorting to the latter. You can read my remarks below.

But first, let me tell you about the woman who introduced me. Hope Tumukunde served as governor of Butare province in Rwanda. Her leadership in the fragile post-genocide era has made Hope a member of Rwanda’s National Human Rights Commission.     

In introducing me, she emphasized our Oprah connection: Hope came to NYU’s School of Public Service as an Oprah Scholar, while I earned Oprah’s first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction.”

On that note, I began my remarks to the 2008 graduating class…

Honored graduates: If I had a Chutzpah Award to bestow, it would be going to all of you – as an expression of faith in your capacity to live life large.

You see, “chutzpah” doesn’t simply mean “guts.” It’s far more interesting than that. There’s an element of brazen, passionate zaniness to it. A zaniness that evokes reactions like, “Is she all there?” Or, “Does he really believe that’s possible?”

Chutzpah is a commitment to see something through when others shrug their shoulders and mumble, “Why bother?”

No doubt, that’s what some will be asking about your choice to pursue public service in a cut-throat culture. Why bother?

The fact that you’ve made it all the way to graduation suggests you’ve thought about this. You know why you’re compelled to serve. And frankly, you don’t need a meshugeneh [insane] Muslim reformer to tell you what you already know.

But a few years from now, you’ll need to remember why you’ve chosen public service. Because despite our ideals – universal human rights, critical thinking, eco-justice – despite such noble and shared ideals, the reality is that public service has politics written all over it; politics that can reek of hypocrisy, hysteria and myopia.

I speak with some experience. When I wrote a book calling on my fellow Muslims to affirm the dignity of women, Christians, Jews and gays, many self-described moderates labeled me a fascist – the extreme liberal equivalent of Osama bin Laden.

I recall engaging in lengthy dialogue with one group of angry moderates from New Jersey. After listening to their complaints, I asked what they would have me do now. The spokesman promptly whipped out a list of offensive passages and demanded that I remove them from my book.

 “But wait,” I thought to myself, “isn’t that what fascists would do – censor, suppress and ban? In the name of harmony, should I pretend to consider their proposal and later decline? Or, in the name of honesty, should I explain here and now why I can’t accept their approach?”

Welcome to the politics of public leadership. That’s just the beginning.

We live in a time of intense identity politics. So when immigrant Muslims are branded “inauthentic” Muslims because our ideas are incubated in the West, I have to wonder how Mahatma Gandhi would respond.

After all, Gandhi came of age in South Africa, not India. Was he therefore illegitimate?

Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha or non-violent resistance took shape in South Africa. Did that make it impure?

Gandhi studied the American philosopher and anti-corruption activist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a classic essay on civil disobedience. By drawing inspiration from a white Western man, did Gandhi sell out?

You can see how intellectually parochial these political games are. Yet they’re emotionally powerful, especially now. In our age of instant gratification, the fastest way to belong is to sacrifice your complex self for the security blanket of groupthink.

Here’s the problem with that shortcut: It’s a shortcut. Fast does not mean fulfilling. If you bow to petty politics too often, public service will lose meaning – the very meaning that brought you to it in the first place.

The very meaning that spoke to your core commitments based, as they are, on who you are.

Your authenticity.

Your individuality.

Your integrity.

At some point in your public service career, your conscience will pose a highly inconvenient challenge. You’ll have to decide whether to speak truth to power in your workplace, in your social movement, in your family of fellow travelers, and speak that truth for the sake of a greater good.

If you do, you’ll be exercising what Robert F. Kennedy called “moral courage.” Sounds deliciously lofty. Except that moral courage comes with major costs. For starters, backlash from your own. Followed, inevitably, by loneliness.

Bobby Kennedy didn’t airbrush these realities. He admitted, “few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.”

Then why bother? When you know you’ll be flayed and a glorious outcome can’t be guaranteed for your pains, what’s the point of having moral courage? It’s nuts. It’s chutzpah.

Allow me to offer three reasons that you should bother with moral courage:

First, for the pragmatic graduates – and I’m looking at all of you – moral courage gives you a competitive edge. Bette Midler, the comedic actress, once advised, “Cherish forever that which makes you unique, ‘cuz if it goes, you’re really a yawn.” Call me cynical, but imitating everyone else isn’t exactly a selling point to innovative employers or investors.

Let me put it more positively: Nobody can execute better what you have been placed on this earth to do. In a world of puny agendas, moral courage equips you to defend your vision.

Now for the second reason to bother with moral courage: Because even if you feel lonely, you are you not alone. Gandhi is part of the company you keep. But he’s only one example.

Gandhi’s methods taught Martin Luther King Jr. a thing or two, including how to handle criticism from his own community. Liberal members of the clergy, white and black, accused Reverend King of creating “needless tension.” Rather than dilute his integrity or beg to be understood, King confronted this charge.

In his now-famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Reverend King wrote, “I must confess I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension but there is a type of non-violent tension that is necessary for growth.”

Alright, graduates, I’m about to test you: Imagine having to navigate not just the President’s animosities toward you, not just the FBI’s dirty tricks against you, not just the media’s suspicions of you, not just the average citizen’s ignorance about you, and not just your family’s fatigue with you and your 24/7 mission.

On top of it all, there’s the insecurity and insularity of your supposed allies. Being an icon of civil rights did not shield Martin Luther King from having to deal with that noise. So when you’re facing it too, you’ve got to believe that you are not alone.

The good news is, no one’s expecting you to transform an entire culture. We only expect you to shove it forward.

Which brings me to the third reason that you should bother with moral courage: Leaps and bounds don’t happen without the pushes that generate momentum.

To this day, a lot of Americans assume that Martin Luther King motivated Rosa Parks to keep her seat on that bus. Nope. Ms. Parks hit the civil rights scene before Rev. King did. She helped move him to the front lines.

And who was Rosa? A seamstress. A tailor’s assistant. By today’s professional standards, a veritable nothing. Yet a small, strategically executed act of conscience made her the mother of America’s civil rights movement.

Our acts of moral courage won’t assure massive change today. Likely not even tomorrow. Progress is never that linear since power is never that simple. But bother anyway – because in an open society, everybody counts.

To drive this message home, I’ll finish with a deeply personal story. My family and I are refugees from Uganda. General Idi Amin, the military dictator, expelled us along with hundreds of thousands of other Muslims.

We settled in Vancouver, Canada. But our port of entry was Montreal. The immigration agent on duty had no official reason to care about us. She engaged with my mother, anyway. “Why do you want to live in Montreal?” she asked in French.

My mother grew up in the Belgian Congo, so mercifully she spoke French too. “Why do we want to live in Montreal?” mum replied, buying time. “Well, Montreal begins with the letter ‘M,’ and our family’s name begins with the letter ‘M,’ so maybe God thinks we would fit nicely together.”

(You try coming up with an answer on the spot when you’re terrified of being deported!)

Sensing my mother’s anxiety, the agent assured her that this wasn’t an interrogation. “It’s just that I’m looking at your three daughters,” she said, “and I realize that they’re all dressed for tropical weather. Madame Manji, have you ever seen snow?”

Still assuming this to be a grilling, my mother exclaimed, “No, but I can’t wait to see snow!”

“Then you’ve come to the right country,” the agent assured her. “But with your permission, I’d like to send you and your girls to the closest thing we’ve got to a mild climate.” A few stamps on the paperwork later, we were bound for the other side of Canada – Vancouver.

Some would reduce this immigration agent to a shrewd arbiter of cheap labor. And she may have been. I won’t deny that possibility. But she was also complex, risking her job by asking what we might need more of, like sunshine. Her minuscule demonstration of chutzpah, bucking an ice-cold system, helps fuel my own chutzpah today.

Bottom line: In an open society, the choices that any individual makes matter. Open societies are under constant renovation, the conclusion not yet known if it ever will be. So what you choose to do contributes to the grander narrative of who we are and what we can become.

Your voice carries. May it carry us into a future when we’ll proudly admit that a little craziness is sometimes the sanest response of all. Thank you for your service, God bless and go get ‘em, graduates!

Learn about the Moral Courage Project…