In his May 8 commencement address to nearly 3,000 Emory graduates, noted literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and chair of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, encouraged the class of 1995 to reconceptualize the familiar image of adulthood.
"I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that America had passed from adolescence to senility without ever having experienced adulthood," Gates said. "That may be true of Americans generally, but it's not such a bad thing. The adolescent is trying to find himself or herself, according to the old cliché. Once you find yourself, what do you do? Well, you get yourself laminated, laced with sodium benzoate, and you preserve whoever it was you decided you were for the next few decades. That, by custom, is called adulthood.
"Also by custom," Gates continued, "a university education is the ideal rite of passage to this vulnerable end. In fact, college has always served as a crucible where difference and commonality clash and collide and overcome. It goes against common sense for some people to be told that we have to learn and relearn our ethnic identities: how to be black, how to be white, how to be Jewish, how to be gay."
While acknowledging the ease of "poking fun" at identity politics, Gates also said that collective identity can't be voided "like a canceled stamp. Consider the resurgence of nationalism in the wake of the Soviet Empire. Ninety years ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. With ethnic violence raging in no less than 48 countries today, from Bosnia to Burundi, from Turkistan to Tibet, it seems that the problem of the 21st century will be the problem of ethnic identity, as ethnicity comes to stand as a mask or a metaphor for economic differentials and economic scarcity.
"Another problem with talking about identity politics," Gates continued, "is that there is no identity without politics. Identity will always be a site of contestation. That means that identity is always fluid, always evolving in relation to other identities. Neither the forces that favor acculturation nor those opposed should be dismissed ahead of time. Surely both will always be in play. And it's especially important to think through these issues here in America, because it is a distinctive trait of America that it has always conceived of itself as a plural nation."
Borrowing from the traditional American model of progress, in which each succeeding generation does a little bit better than its parents, Gates wondered whether multiculturalism has made such progress. "What do proponents of multiculturalism today have to say that wasn't said rather more elegantly...75 years ago?" he asked. "We can't require of contemporary pluralism that it get everything right, only that it does a little better than its precursors...Pluralism isn't supposed to be about policing the boundaries. It's supposed to be about breaking these boundaries down, acknowledging the fluid and interactive nature of all identities. I guess that's why I'm uncomfortable with the notion of adulthood being founded on a static, laminated sense of self, the notion that finding yourself, that self-fashioning and refashioning, is another of those adolescent maladies like acne, which you're supposed to outgrow.
"What if, instead, we saw this kind of refashioning as one of the truly ethical tasks of our lives? I don't say express yourself, as Madonna would have it. I say, invent yourself. Don't restrict yourself to the off-the-rack model. There isn't one way to be white or black, gay or straight, Hispanic or Asian, liberal or conservative, male or female. The stronger a sense you nurture of the contingent nature of all such identities, the less likely it is that you will be harmed by them or, in their name, inflict harm upon others."
Gates said the futility of using such indentifying labels is illustrated in the words of writer James Baldwin: "Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other, male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other." Gates urged the graduates to remember Baldwin's words when "people such as [former Republican presidential candidate] Pat Buchanan put forward a vision of America as a country riven by warring creeds ... where the forces of good are arrayed in ceaseless struggle against indulgence, decadence and anarchy. They complain about the fragmentation of the American polity, but they fail to recognize their own role in advancing such fragmentation. In fact, the trend that they have backed is to ethnicize ideology, to treat political labels such as liberal or conservative as social identities, analogous to such social designations as black, Chicano or gay. In their scheme of things, these labels aren't just rough guides to political inclination but are, on some deeper level, who you really are as a person. This tendency [call it the omnipotence of the label] can be as dangerous as any of the ideologies it annexes."
"Forging humane commonalities out of the crucible of our differences is always an ongoing effort, rather than a task that can be finished and forgotten like a senior essay," Gates said in conclusion. "But when I think back to my own student days in the late '60s and early '70s, as bewitching and bewildering as they were, I'm filled with confidence about this class...The challenge I set before you this morning is not so very onerous. I don't ask that you get everything right. I just ask that you do a little bit better than we did."
Following Gates' address, President Bill Chace conferred degrees on the more than 2,900 graduates, approximately 150 of whom received Ph.D.s. The class of 1995 is comprised of 46 percent men and 54 percent women. Thirty-one students received dual degrees. The graduates represent 49 of the 50 states; 114 international graduates represent 48 foreign nations. The youngest and oldest recipients of bachelor's degrees are 19 and 54 years old respectively. The oldest graduate received a Master of Theological Science at the age of 69.
--Dan Treadaway
Editor's note: Information on recipients of major awards at commencement, including the Marion Luther Brittain Award, Thomas Jefferson Award and Scholar/Teacher of the Year, appears on Pages 4, 5 and 6, along with other highlights from commencement.