Good Evening, Friends, Faculty, Family, Graduates and My Colleagues: Graduates of Spring

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