Transcript
0:10 Good morning. I am so honored to be part of the class of 2012, and I once sat where you all are sitting today. So, I know for a fact that there's a bunch of people who just rolled in from last night. I know that to be true. I know that yes, that they're apparently they're sitting over there. I know that there are others who've been preparing for this day since the moment they have walked onto this campus.
0:37 And I know that for everybody this is a culmination of years of hard work. Today you're surrounded by people who love and support you. They're the folks up here. The people who got you here, really. They are your brothers and your sisters and your parents and your grandparents, your your out-and-out fans who've sacrificed and whose constant belief in you has helped you to achieve. And to the parents especially here today, I know you're looking down at the sea of graduates and you see your baby. You see a baby.
1:10 You see your baby who is about to fly out of the nest and into the real world. I have four small children, so I know what the anticipation of this very moment is like. So, I'm going to lay your fears to rest a little bit. They're not leaving. No, I I don't just mean that metaphorically, like literally. They're not leaving. we talk about the boomerang generation. These independent young people are moving back in with you. Even if they have jobs. Yes, there it's the food's better, it's not expensive.
1:43 You can borrow a car. They are moving back home with you. See, I told you. I know for sure if it doesn't happen this year, if it doesn't happen next year, the year after. You know, the year that I moved out of my parents' home after I left school, my parents knocked down the wall of my bedroom that separated their bedroom. They expanded their bedroom. I had no room. I still came back twice. They're not leaving. Fear not.
2:15 To the graduates. Today, I think is a bittersweet day. I can see some of you wistfully looking around at a campus where you've sort of grown up, where you've become men and women, where you've developed deep friendships and strong bonds. And I think for some of you, you're worried that you might lose a a strong connection to your alma mater starting today because your graduation, for some of you, will mean saying goodbye to all you've known here at the University of Delaware.
2:47 So, let me put those fears to rest, too. This university will be part of your life forever. The Alumni Association will hunt you down. They will find you. Literally, you can join the Peace Corps and be working in the Congo. They will get a letter to you about how your membership in the Association of Alumni has not gone through and they're sure the check is on the way. You might be working as an investment banker 120 hours a week at a top-tier investment bank working as an analyst so busy that your own mother has given up on trying to reach you.
3:28 They will find you. They will track you down. Trust me. Since it's graduation, we all sort of know how it's supposed to work. I'm going to stand up here and give lots of advice. You will all dutifully nod your head since I know President Harker said he's the one standing between you and the graduation, but really it's me. and you're going to nod your heads and listen but there's one thing that's a little problematic, which is I don't give advice. Many years ago, a woman's magazine actually asked me for the best advice my mother ever gave me.
4:01 And see, my mother is a immigrant to this country, very tough nut mom versus the warm and fuzzy mom. And I said, "Really, this is a bad idea. No, thank you." They said, "No, no, we're going to do a Mother's Day spread. You, your mom, hugging in the paper. Be great. Best advice your mother ever gave you." And I said, "Okay, my mother's best advice was, most people are idiots." I said that to the editor, and she said, "Oh, well, we'll call you back." Never heard from her again.
4:32 So, you can see why I really don't give advice. But actually, my mother's advice was very true, graduates. And when you leave here, you will be told in many varied ways over many years of all the things that you cannot do, you cannot achieve, and you will absolutely, positively fail. People will say you cannot get a job in a down economy. People will say you cannot get a job that you love, that will pay you well.
4:59 People will say you can't do good and do well. They're wrong. That's idiotic advice. And people will tell you you cannot change the world. They're wrong, too. Let's agree to agree that we're going to ignore all the idiots today. My parents My parents, in a lot of ways, were my role models in not listening, you know, and they really spent their lives ignoring people. They were dating at a time as a a mixed-race couple at a time when interracial dating was frowned upon. And I used to say to my mom, "So, when you say frowned upon, like, what does that mean, exactly?" And she'd say, "Oh, you could be shot."
5:45 My parents came to America for an education and my mother who's black and Cuban and my father who's white and Australian met in 1958 because they used to go to daily mass together. They were both in school, graduate school and they they go to daily mass. My my dad drove but my mother didn't have a car and so my father every single day would stop his car and wind down the window and back then for our young graduates, no power windows, right? So you had to lean over and commit. And every day he'd say, "Would you like a ride?" And every day my mother would say, "No, thank you."
6:20 Because you don't take a ride from someone you don't know well. Even to daily mass apparently who you're going to sit next to in the next pew, but I digress. And every day he would say, "Would you like a ride?" And every day she would say, "No, thank you." And then one day she said, "Yes, thank you. I would like a ride." And they made a date to go on a date. But because it was 1958 in Baltimore, Maryland, a place where interracial dating could get you killed, literally, every single restaurant they went to would not seat them together. They said to my father, "You can come in." But to my mother they said, "No, and certainly not together." Every restaurant after restaurant. And eventually my mother brought my father back to her apartment and made him dinner because she's an amazing cook of Cuban food that's fabulous. And my mother's entire point for telling this story mostly to her four daughters was, "See girls, if you could cook, you could get a man."
7:14 I like to say, "I can't make it but I can make it happen delivered to my doorstep in 20 minutes." My parents married at the end of 1958 when interracial marriage was illegal in the state of Maryland and 16 other states and they they drove to Washington, D.C. where marriage between different race couples was legal and got hitched and then they drove back and lived illegally as a couple. And when their friends said to them, "Whatever you do, don't have kids because biracial children will never find a place in this world." I'm number five of six. My parents were terrible listeners every step of the way. Some advice is just idiotic.
7:59 My parents knew that they were on the right side of history and they never listened to how other people told them they should live their lives. And so, they knew that history would catch up to them. In 1967, in fact, by the time my little brother was born, the sixth child, the Supreme Court would overturn the ban on interracial marriage. And when my mother would tell me stories about how she walked down the street with my father and her biracial children and people would spit on us, I used to say to her, "How did you handle that? How did you deal with that? How did you deal with people saying to your face, 'You're disgusting.'"
8:36 And she used to say, "Oh, Lovey." Cuz she calls me Lovey. "Lovey, we knew America was better than that." She stopped taking advice. So, I became a reporter cuz I wanted to tell stories about people kind of like my mother and father, regular people. I wanted to ask tough questions and understand people's lives and their perspectives. And I think sometimes people think my job is about interviewing famous people or political pundits. It is not. I see my job as trying to understand people, the lives they live, the choices they've made, their dreams, their goals, their hopes, their fears.
9:17 That is what I do. When I started reporting documentaries like Black in America and Latino in America and Muslim in America, literally people would give me the advice, "Don't do it. Nobody cares about the voices of people who won't be in the history books." I did a documentary on coal miners in West Virginia and female rescue workers at ground zero. Documentaries on post-Katrina New Orleans and Haiti. I ignored the advice. And what I learned was a very important lesson.
9:49 We have a shared humanity. We all want the same things. And people would say to me, "Why would you talk about a subset of people, whether it's Muslims or women or African-Americans or coal miners?" For me, I discovered by telling their stories, by telling our stories, by giving voice to their history, by digging into their conversations, I could reveal more to the rest of America to give perspective so people would understand individuals better. I could help people peer through the walls so we could see at the end of the day we're actually all very much the same. And if we start with understanding that our dream is everybody's dream, we better understand that we are just part of a bigger whole, not divided by political labels or gender or race or class or religion, but made stronger as a nation because of what binds us in spite of those differences. It's why heritage and identity matters and we can all be proud that we are here together.
10:53 Those differences can be explored and celebrated and examined and argued about even. But understanding people by hearing their stories that you've never heard of before is the first step to building bridges over those walls. "America is greater than that," said my mother, and she was right. This is the best thing about my job, and as you commence, graduates, into a new beginning, it can be the thing about this phase of your life. My best and most important stories have come from people whose names you'll never remember because they're stories of the American dream. Regardless of the job you're starting or the next step that you're taking, you too can work to understand people where they are. You think because you're leaving here, you're done with learning. Let me assure you that you are not. You've succeeded in learning how to learn.
11:44 And to make a life, not just a living, but a life requires learning what it means to be responsible to other people. When I sat where you sat, I wanted to know the following things. will I have a job? Will I have a career? Am I going to be successful? That was pretty much what I wanted to know. Those were really the wrong questions. And so, as I said, you don't need advice, except maybe the advice of don't listen to stupid advice, but do seek out and listen. Listen to other people.
12:16 Try to hear them. I have made a career of that, and it has been rewarding mostly because when you seek to listen, you can make a huge impact. Remember, even as you calculate your student loan debt and your first apartment debt, your real debt is to the people around you, your fellow man. And how do we seek to understand each other, our differences and our similarities? Because until we do that, we're never going to make the world a better place.
12:46 Last weekend I was in Haiti. I was working as a volunteer at an orphanage, and that orphanage was the focus of a documentary I did in the wake of Haiti's terrible earthquake. I remember tent cities would pop up overnight. Literally, you go to bed with 20,000 people in a tent city, and the next morning when you woke up it'd be 40,000 people. And trucks would sometimes roll by, and I would think, "Oh my gosh, that truck looks like it's full of bodies. Oh my god. Oh my god, it is."
13:14 It was like the picture of horror at times. And yet the place had moments of humanity and hope, even in the moments after that earthquake. One morning I got up and in front of the tent city, all these women had made brooms and they were sweeping the front of their tent city and their message was, "We are human beings, too." I was there to tell the story of missionaries who were working to save some of the 450,000 Haitian orphans in a one orphanage.
13:45 After wandering wandering around the grounds for a little while, I opened up the back of a box truck, big square truck, and inside were 25 infants. That's where they were keeping them cuz there was no place to house them. And because they would feed them this sort of milk and rice mash, which babies cannot tolerate, they would get sicker. And there was sort of this vicious cycle happening because they get dehydrated and the only thing to give them was this mash, so it was this terrible cycle. And I said to the missionary who we were doing a documentary on, I said, "How do you do this? How do you continue to work when there is no light at the end of the tunnel? How do you try to save lives and change with so much sadness and sometimes failure around you? Like, it looks impossible from where I'm standing. Honestly, I don't know how you do it."
14:33 And she said to me, "Well, really, it's about the starfish story." I said, "Well, what's the starfish story? I never heard of that." She said, "You know, the starfish story. A boy is walking along the beach. The tide's gone out and all these starfish, millions of starfish, have been beached. And so, he starts picking up starfish and chucking them back into the ocean. One at a time. And a man comes up to him and says, "What are you doing? This beach goes on for miles.
15:02 There are millions of starfish that have been beached. You're never going to be able to make a dent in this problem. You're wasting your time." And the kid picks up a starfish and says, "Well, I guess it matters to this one." And chucks it in. And I love that story because I guess it's a metaphor for us, about our lives on this shared planet. The only solution can be, when we all focus on what's right in front of us, and we grab a starfish, and we chuck it back.
15:34 And we know that actually, if you're joined by a couple more people at the beach, and they bring a few more people on the other end of the beach, and suddenly everybody's on the beach chucking starfish back in, you actually could make a fair amount of progress. But if you listen to the voice of the person who says, "You're wasting your time. Why do you bother?" you will make no progress at all. I can guarantee you that.
15:58 Dante once said, "The deepest places in hell, Dante, you know, the deepest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality." Which, in a nutshell, means there's nothing worse than doing nothing and saying nothing when your voice is needed. Nothing worse than that. And so, as you head out into the world with new jobs and new life experiences, I beg of you, do not maintain your neutrality, as Dante warns.
16:28 Pursue excellence. Break down those walls. Push through the barriers. Try to understand people where they are. People you don't know. People you think you do know. Seek to know, so you can understand communities other than your own. We're all in this together. And to make America even greater than that, as my mom would say, requires a constant curiosity about each other, and accountability to each other.
17:01 And that, I guarantee you, is what bring you life satisfaction, and improve the world for everyone. Congratulations to the class of 2012.
17:48 Oh.