Lavendar and WGST Graduation Speech 5-14-2018 Suzanne Scott Constantine. Hello Graduates. Hello my dear Queer people. Hello everyone, whatever your other identities! I am thrilled to have been invited back as the faculty speaker at Lavender and Women and Gender Studies Graduation. Lav Grad began 10 years ago under the leadership of Ric Chollar. This is an important milestone and an indicator of great change at Mason and beyond. Women and Gender Studies has formally been a part of the celebration for three years now, and this year we also celebrate the first graduate in the Women and Gender Studies Major. Congratulations, Sarah Metcalf. Change happens. When I spoke last time, in spring 2010, the Queer community was pretty raw. The year before Brian Picone had delivered an impassioned student speech at Lavender Graduation. Then he died suddenly and unexpectedly the next fall semester when he was a guest speaker at a Queer Studies class at Mason. At that time, I spoke about the ways I was transformed by Brian s life and radicalized by his death. His spirit lives on here tonight. I ask us to take a moment of silence to remember Brian and to think about all of the people who are not here -- Women, Queer, Trans, Black, Latinx, Muslim and all others who have been marginalized,
rejected, killed. And, finally, to think about all of our families and circles of friends who, for various reason, are NOT here to celebrate with us tonight because of brokenness. [A moment of silence.] Thank you. And to those who are here faculty, staff, students, families, allies, partners, spouses, administrators we THANK YOU! We need you, we love you, we thank you for being with us. So what can I say to graduates tonight? I heard Oprah say to a graduating class that her one piece of advice would be VOTE. I have to agree with that. But If I could give this particular group of students one piece of advice and give it to myself, too it would be to be yourself. Be authentic. Be weird. Let your freak flag fly! That takes all kind of courage, and in trying to be your authentic selves, you bump up against all of your fears and neuroses and therein not only lies a tale but an opportunity for personal growth and change. I speak from experience. But it s never easy to be ourselves. It s scary because we bear witness to what happens to marginalized people in the world. But here s what I know. Sometimes our inner censors are the hardest for us to face.
Don t let that horse eat that violin Said Chagall s mother. But he kept right on painting horse with violin in mouth And he became famous. Those are the opening words of a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you ve never heard of artist Marc Chagall, you may want to google him when you get home you ll see that he painted whimsical paintings that were NOT realistic at all, even though the images in the paintings were representations. Don t we all carry with us a little bit of Chagall s mother in our heads admonishing us to be realistic: tone it down..don t be weird..be ladylike.don t be a sissy. So listen to me, graduates. Keep right on painting your version of horse with violin in mouth. Don t give in the voices in your heads that tell you not to value your own imaginations. You know what it feels like to honor that authentic, imaginative, weird self. And I am so proud of you, you beautiful people, you! You did it! And you did it even in the midst of this beautiful but badly broken world -- in the midst of xenophobia on multiple levels.. in the midst of fears of deportation.. fears of exclusion, of humiliation, of harassment, of death. In the midst of all of the brokenness, you managed to complete
that final project, write that final paper (well, maybe), finish that final exam. You did it. You did it while working on trying to mend some of that brokenness in yourselves, and in the world because you know, better than any past generation that we are all a mish-mash of identities that often collide as intersecting oppressions. That makes everything just a little bit harder for you. Beyond that, you seem to get the idea that no matter what the injustice, women and children, people of color and people without financial resources are ALWAYS disproportionately affected. I am beyond proud of this cohort. I have watched you grapple with and come to a profound understanding of these issues. I have seen great changes for us at Mason over the nearly two decades of my service here. I am grateful. I have also witnessed tremendous changes in our students. I cannot say it enough. I am so proud of you. And I acknowledge that I have learned from you. That is not just another cliché. Because of you, I have spent a great deal of my time at Mason thinking about what it means to be a professor who attempts to teach eager students about social justice in a chaotic and broken world? I m going to play back to you three concepts I ve learned from you over the course of our time together. And in full disclosure, what I have learned over deep breakfast
conversations with my beloved wife of 38 years, Lynne Scott Constantine. So I give back to you three important concepts you have helped me understand. Use them, as you move into your orbits of influence. Use them as educated people who care about the brokenness in our world today. First is humility. No, not the kind of false, aw-shucks kind of humility that claims unworthiness. I mean the kind of humility that recognizes that making assumptions based on stereotypes is something we all do but humility allows you to intentionally disrupt those assumptions. You know that stereotypes are incomplete narratives. I m talking about the kind of humility that permits you to properly value yourself and your ideas -- and at the same time opens a place for learning by listening. A kind of humility that allows you to be your authentic self. Your authentic Black Self. Your authentic White Self. Your authentic Queer Self. Your authentic Muslim Self. LatinX. Asian. Biracial, Mixed, Woman, Man, Trans, Intersex, Cis, Bi, Gay, Pan, Asexual. Or your authentic no-label person. I have discovered, often by the hardest, that there is great generosity in listening. And it s a generosity that extends even to
yourself because when you don t close yourself off from anyone who might disagree with you, you open your own possibilities for an expansive view. I m not asking that you betray your own moral center. Quite the contrary. Be yourself always, but without rigidly setting up a barrier that walls off new possibilities. The second characteristic I see in students working for social justice is Curiosity. Curiosity did NOT kill the cat. Curiosity enlivens! Curiosity broadens. Curiosity ultimately pushes us through the madness and chaos and helps us create something new new knowledge, new pathways, new ways of seeing. It also makes you a more interesting person to be around. It is tied to humility and openness, but curiosity is what pushes you to know more even about the things you think you know it all! Curiosity is what keeps you from being led astray by the echo of your own voice. Curiosity allows you to crack open your own certainties. And oh my, we can be so certain at times. Let me share a brief story about certainty! My wife and I recently moved to a new home on the OBX and we wanted to hang some wind chimes on the pergola outside. We needed cup hooks. Lynne went to the garage where she was certain the tool box was that contained the cup hooks. She came back and announced that the toolbox was not in the garage. I was, of course,
certain that she had overlooked it. So I marched myself into the garage, and looked at the shelf where I was certain the tool box had been, and it was not there. Hmmmm. Well that s odd, I said. It was right there. I know, said Lynne. One of us must have moved it. So we proceeded to look for that toolbox in the garage, but it was not there. We were both still convinced that it had been on THAT shelf. You probably already know the ending. The toolbox had never been on THAT SHELF, even though we were both certain we had seen it there. It turned up in the way-back of our studio upstairs, where it was placed the day of the move. Cracking our own certainties about that toolbox wasn t a life changing event, but it certainly made us both aware of the fact that we must always be motivated to know more, to look beyond what we think we know -- and what we think we see. The third characteristic I have observed in students who are on a quest for social justice is compassion. This is a hard one because anyone who is conscious of world events experiences anger and despair and even those who want to be empathetic experience compassion fatigue. I get that. But I am convinced that anger and despair will not sustain us, and when I look around at the people who are suffering the most around the
world, I see a force within them that keeps them from giving up and giving in to the hopelessness that seems so obvious to onlookers. People in dire circumstances find joy in the smallest interactions, clinging to each other with hope. It seems impossible, and the temptation is to give in to depression and despair and to declare, Oh, that s just the way it is. Or What is it possible for one small person, as an individual to do, when everything seems broke? I have seen that compassion is one way out of the hopelessness and despair that has threatened to overtake many of us this past year. Compassion that lets us know that we belong to each other, as Saint Teresa of Calcutta said. And compassion in Bryan Stevenson who said, our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. Everyone. And he was talking about the survival of people convicted of murder. I have seen in my classrooms that compassion allows us to start from a position of trust and concern. I assume the best about you. I believe you. I believe the best about you. I care about you. You believe me. You assume the best about me. I make a mistake. Maybe a bad mistake, but you assumed my intentions were good and allowed me to make amends. Compassion allows us all to start from a position where there is space to grow and to call forth the better angels of our natures.
These three characteristics humility, curiosity and compassion -- may sound idealistic and unrealistic to those of us struggling this minute with broken hearts, broken families, broken bodies, and broken lives. I know. I know. I know. And then there are our own personal versions of Chagall s mother in our heads, saying Don t! Don t let that horse eat that violin. But I am old. I have seen dramatic change in my lifetime. I have seen change at Mason in my 18 years here. I have seen dramatic change for Queer people in the last four years. Not enough; especially for trans people. But some. Progress does not occur as a straight trajectory, but it does occur. You will be a piece of that progress! I know it. Just please keep right on painting YOUR VERSIONS of the horse with violin in mouth.