Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to and reading transcripts of commencement speeches from liberal colleges and HBCUs across the country. And in so many of them, the speakers have been standing before young people in caps and gowns, looking out at graduates who have survived pandemics, political chaos, the election of Donald Trump, the election of Donald Trump again, student debt, climate dread, mass shootings, algorithmic brain rot, housing precarity, and whatever fresh hell is trending that day, and telling them some version of the same thing.
“You graduates are inheriting the worst world.” “The air is worse.” “The food is worse.” “The government is worse.” “The jobs are worse.” “The politics are worse.” “The future is worse.” “Everything fucking thing is . . . worse.”
And I get the instinct to say these things. Trust, I really do. Because this moment feels ugly and unstable as hell. It feels like the country has a gas leak and half the population is walking around wearing musty red hats and flicking matches. The cruelty is loud and the corruption is naked. The cost of living is obscene. The courts are reckless. The Constitution doesn’t seem to mean shit anymore. The attacks on Black history, public education, reproductive freedom, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, librarians, protesters, workers, and basic democratic norms are not imaginary.
The White House is a hot ghetto mess with that tacky-ass UFC cage on the lawn as it prepares to celebrate the nation’s 250th with low-class bargain-bin strongman boolshit and a mass KKK parade. Indeed, we are watching a backlash against every unfinished freedom struggle this country has ever tried to bury.
But commencement speeches live in the archives and they become records of what adults thought they were telling young people at a particular moment in history. And years from now, when folks go back and read or watch these speeches, they should not find grown people confusing despair with historical analysis. Because the claim that today’s graduates are facing the worst time in American history does not survive contact with American history. It actually lies on the archives.
As I’ve been listening to these speeches I keep asking: Worse than when?
Worse than when Black children could be sold away from their mothers before they were old enough to understand what a sale was? Worse than when enslaved people were whipped, branded, raped, hunted, mortgaged, insured, inherited, and worked to death so other people could build wealth and call it civilization? Worse than when this country wrote human bondage into law and then congratulated itself for being thee model of democracy, freedom, and liberty?
Worse than Indigenous genocide? Worse than native children being kidnapped into boarding schools where their hair was cut, their languages were beaten out of them, their names were stolen, and their families were severed? Worse than a government that built its westward expansion on broken treaties, massacres, forced removals, and the theft of land from people it then called savage?
Worse than child labor, when children worked in mines, mills, fields, factories, and glassworks before they had even finished growing? Worse than children coughing coal dust out of their lungs, losing fingers in textile machinery, and bending their bodies into industrial profit just so adults could call that cruelty work ethic?
Worse than lynching thousands of men, women, children, and unborn babies? Worse than Jim Crow? Worse that Atlanta, Tulsa, Rosewood, Springfield, and Greenwood? Worse than sundown towns? Worse than poll taxes, literacy tests, convict leasing, chain gangs, racial pogroms, segregated schools, hospitals, cemeteries, and white mobs who could murder Black people in public and smile next to burnt bodies for the camera afterward?
Worse than when women couldn’t vote? Worse than when married women had limited control over their own money, bodies, property, and futures? Worse than back alley abortions? Worse than when domestic violence was treated as a private family matter, sexual harassment was considered the cost of having a job, marital rape was not recognized as a crime in many states, and women were told to endure whatever men did to them because that was the natural order?
Worse than when rivers caught fire? Worse than when children breathed lead from gasoline and paint? Worse than when factories dumped poison into water and air with little restraint? Worse than when workers were maimed, burned, crushed, and poisoned before there were meaningful protections? Worse than when people died of diseases we now prevent, treat, or manage?
Now, I’m not in denial here, and I’m not saying the present is fine. Of course it isn’t. But we have to stop telling young people that they are living through the worst moment simply because this is the worst moment many comfortable adults have personally felt. That ain’t the same thing.
While some commencement stages are drowning graduates in liberal despair by telling them the world is fucked, the future is dead, and every adult has failed them, the right is using its commencement stages very differently. Those degenerates are not apologizing for shit. You are not seeing them doing any of that hand-wringing. They are not telling their graduates to be anxious about the future. They are training them to seize it! By any means necessary.
Did Y’all watch Pete Hegseth’s West Point speech?
That wasn’t no commencement address. That shit was a sermon for empire. It was racist as hell, militarized as hell, and openly hostile to the very language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Quite frankly, it was homicidal with a promise of immunity. He told future Army officers that “diversity is not our strength,” framed “lethality” as the highest virtue, and promised them “top cover” when they make “hard calls.” The official Army write-up says he emphasized “readiness and lethality,” told graduates they were being sent “perhaps, to war,” and said his job was to “untie your hands” and “have your back.”
That is the sound of the right speaking to its young people. They are not saying, “We failed you.” Not “Everything is worse.” Not “The future may not be survivable.” They are saying quite boldly: take power! Reject shame! Ignore the critics! Restore the old order! Go for broke! And do not flinch!
And that is what makes the liberal commencement mood so goddamn pathetic and dangerous. While one side is telling its graduates that history is basically a smoking crater and all they can do is inherit the ruins, the other side is handing its graduates guns and swords, a myth, an enemy list, and permission.
This is why historical clarity matters. Because fascistic politics does not need young people to understand history. It needs them to feel chosen by a counterfeit version of it. It needs them to believe they are restoring greatness, rescuing civilization, purging weakness, and saving the nation from all the people who supposedly made it soft. That is how “anti-woke” language becomes racial warfare. And the right has been preparing for this moment for the past 50 years.
Meanwhile, too many liberal speeches are giving young people a beautifully written panic attack. How the hell are you gonna fight authoritarian nostalgia with therapeutic defeatism? WTF! You can’t answer white nationalist certainty with vague generational guilt. You can’t stand up there and tell graduates that everything is worse than it has ever been and then expect them to walk into the world with historical courage.
Tell them the truth: this moment is dangerous because the people who wanna drag us backward are organized, funded, disciplined, and completely unashamed. They are not confused about the past. They are lying about it on purpose. And that is exactly why graduates need history. They don’t need despair, or nostalgia, or a commencement-season trauma dump. They need history that’s sharp enough to name the danger and sturdy and radical enough to fight it.
Part of what makes this era feel so terrifying is that more people can finally see the machinery. Everything is being recorded like never before. The lies. The police violence. The president and his MAGATs. The book bans are documented and so is the legislative cruelty. But the ugliness ain’t new. The visibility is.
And yes, visibility can be exhausting AF. There is a psychic toll that comes with knowing too much every single day. It’s unrelenting and paralyzing. There is a particular kind of despair that comes from watching powerful people lie in broad daylight and suffer zero consequences. But history demands that we distinguish between a dangerous moment and the worst moment.
Because when we say this is the worst America has ever been, we inadvertantly erase the people who survived worse with fewer rights, fewer tools, fewer witnesses, fewer protections, and fewer ways to make the world see what was happening to them. We flatten their suffering into some kind of motivational backdrop. And we turn the past into a foggy inconvenience and we also rob young folks of something they desperately need, which is proof that people have fought monsters before.
They fought without smartphones and viral videos and social media hashtags. Without civil rights protections and federal oversight. Without the ability to instantly document every beating, every disappearance, every rigged system, and every public act of state violence. And they still fought.
They organized. They resisted. They wrote. Marched. Sued. Taught. Sang. Hid people. Fed people. Built schools. Started newspapers. Formed unions. Buried the dead and kept going. They told the truth when telling the truth could cost them their jobs, their homes, their children, or their lives.
So no, we should not hand graduates a fake optimism wrapped in a diploma cover. They absolutely deserve honesty. They deserve to know that the world they are entering is unstable, unjust, and full of evil assholes trying to drag us backward while pretending they are saving the country. But they also deserve history. They deserve to know that the past was not better. The past was brutal as hell. What we are living through now is not the worst America has ever been. It is America showing us how badly it wants to return to some of its worst habits.
Despair says: This has never been worse, so maybe nothing can be done. History says: Oh, this country has been monstrous before. And every inch of justice we have was dragged out of it by people who refused to confuse brutality with destiny.
So please, stop telling graduates they are facing the worst time in American history. Tell them the truth. Tell them they are facing a dangerous backlash against the gains other people fought, bled, organized, and died to secure. Tell them that rights are not heirlooms. They are not self-cleaning ovens. They do not maintain themselves. Tell them democracy is not a mood and freedom and justice is not an inspirational brand and justice.
Tell them what I always tell my journalism students: “Scholars, the archives are watching.”
Tell them the people who came before them did not survive the worst of America so that we could stand at podiums and pretend history began with our anxiety. Tell them this moment is terrifying, but it is not unprecedented. Tell them to study the past, not because it will comfort them, but because it will keep them from being easily fooled. Tell them that America’s old ghosts are not invincible. They are just persistent. And then tell them to get off their ass, go out, and make the country less haunted.
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