Ruha Benjamin's Speech at Spelman Convocation 2024 (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sociologist Ruha Benjamin’s Speech at Spelman Convocation 2024.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Gratitude

President Gayle, Board of Trustees, beloved faculty, staff, students, alumni, fellow honorees, and everyone working behind the scenes to gather us in this space, my heartfelt thanks for this special recognition. To my village, my family, my friends, my sisters from other misters, my Baha’i family and aunties, my beloved professor, Dr. Barbara Carter, Sister Omelika, so many more I won’t belabor.

So what a lovely video introduction. Like most beautifully produced and polished bios and resumes, it necessarily leaves out the messy parts of life, including the fact that when I was a student at Spelman, I was somewhat of a troublemaker.

Truth is, I have never quite identified with the idealized image of a Spelman woman. And still today, I’m not what you might call a school spirit girly, which I know is a weird thing to admit given the occasion. For starters, I really struggled to pull together a white outfit, because after all these years it’s still not my color. But perhaps more revealing is that the first time I stood at this podium giving the valedictory speech to my class in 2001, I had just given birth a week before.

Embracing Differences at Spelman

So, not quite the idealized Spelman woman, but that’s also what I loved and I love deeply about this place. That precisely by bringing us all together under the umbrella of black womanhood, we get to experience our many shades of blue as a blues people. Unlike predominantly white institutions where black students may feel a need to put up a united front to survive the everyday stresses and strains of navigating a hostile environment, here in this place, we have more space to explore the full range of our humanity, if we choose. When we do, we get to appreciate our breathtaking differences and our quirky individuality.

Like the way that growing up in South Carolina versus Seattle, Louisiana versus Lagos, shaped our experiences and worldviews. And in that, we have so much to share and learn from one another. When we bear witness to our many shades of blue, we necessarily begin to reckon with the way that classism, colorism, ableism, lookism, homophobia, fatphobia, and more create fault lines and hierarchies that complicate the ideal of sisterhood. And that’s when our real education begins.

Studying Sisterhood

After all, we don’t come to Spelman just to receive a world-class education. And I should say, this was the only school I applied to. A world-class education in history, sociology, computer science, women’s studies.

We’re also here to study sisterhood. And to feel good platitudes. We get to truly investigate this thing that is supposed to bind us. What is sisterhood? A feeling, a sense of duty, a shared history. But how do we practice it? Who is welcomed in and who is left out? What makes us a good sister?

ALSO READ: Les Brown: It's Possible (Full Transcript)

What do we do when we aren’t good? When we hurt each other? How do we forgive and do better? What does it mean, in short, to study sisterhood?

One of my favorite lines from Beloved is, “she is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man, the pieces I am. She gather me and give them back to me in all the right order,” wrote Morrison. When we look closely at the lives of many of our luminaries, Tony Cade, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Bell Hooks, Toni Morrison, and more, we learn that their work was made possible by the bonds of sisterhood.

The Importance of Sisterhood

When we choose to study sisterhood, by which I mean take it seriously, tend to it, learn from it, invest in it, sisterhood holds the promise of gathering us up again and again and again, which is why I’m convinced that sisterhood is not the icing on the cake of our Spelman experience. It’s the flour, the water, the leaven. It won’t be on our transcripts, but etched into our spirits.

And so perhaps this is a good time for me to admit that for many years, I wasn’t a good sister. As a young mother in grad school especially, I was so focused on jumping through professional hurdles and hoops and surviving the grueling expectations of academia that sisterhood took a back seat. I wish someone would have reminded me at that time that friendships should never take a back seat. They are the fuel.

They are the compass. They are the road of any work worth its salt. This is on my mind right now because I’m reading a book on how a network of black women changed American culture by Courtney Thorsson, which describes how in the late 70s, a group of black women writers, editors, teachers, students, and journalists met regularly over the course of two years in New York City to support, to protect, and advocate for each other.

Each of the women, some better known than others, is spectacular in their own right. But as Thorsson writes, it was the hard, everyday, largely unseen labor that made that spectacular period possible as they worked to get black women’s writings published, read, reviewed, studied, and taught. Just a few years after this group started gathering, their work flooded the literary landscape. June Jordan’s Passion in 1980, Toni Cade Bambara‘s Salt Eaters, also in 80, Walker’s The Color Purple in 82, Shange’s Sassafrass in 82, Lorde’s Zami in 1982, Morrison’s Tar Baby in 84, among many other works that grew out of the sisterhood.

ALSO READ: Transcript: Why China Cannot Rise Peacefully - John J. Mearsheimer

Sisterhood Gathering the Pieces

The point is not simply that the sisterhood made them productive and successful, but that the sisterhood gathered the pieces they were and gave them back in all the right order. As Walker would say in an interview with the late Rudolph Bird, “we thought we must create a space for black women writers to honor each other, to know each other, so that nothing from outside could make us fight over anything or even feel competitive.” This was the sisterhood’s purpose, she said.

And although they worked mightily to resist competition and ranking, there were, of course, class and generational differences leading to arguments and conflict.

As Septima Clark would say in a very different context, “don’t ever think that everything went right. It didn’t. Many times there were failures, but we had to mull over those failures and work until we could get them ironed out.” Same with sisterhood.

Embracing the Complexity of Sisterhood

It’s not all roses and incense. Sometimes it’s thorns and funk. And so, Spelman class of 2027, as you begin your study of sisterhood, I invite you to embrace it all, the sweetness and the bitters.

Because the world outside of Spelman gives us very little space or time to savor the complexity of who we are. Above all else, I want to encourage you to be careful with each other, so you can be dangerous together. Graduating class of 2024, as you complete your studies and navigate new workplaces, professions, cities, and experiences, I want to remind you that Spelman is more than a college. It’s a flight school, the Nassau for black women, that imparts not only intellectual skills, but the spiritual audacity to fly in and out of worlds that were not created with you in mind.

Dusting Off Your Wings

When you feel weighed down, as we all do, I want to encourage you to dust off your wings, stoned by generations of Spelman women over the course of 143 friggin’ years, so you can fly and be fly. Remember too, that despite the social media slogan, trust black women, you too have to be trustworthy. Black faces in high places are not going to save us.

Just look at the black proponents of Cop City in Atlanta’s leadership class. Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just look at the black woman, Tan, ambassador at the UN, voting against a ceasefire in Gaza. That is, our blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.

ALSO READ: Thomas Sowell: Facts Against Rhetoric, Capitalism, Culture and Yes, the Tariffs (Transcript)

Our blackness and womanness are not themselves trustworthy if we support the occupation of black neighborhoods with so-called better trained police, or remain silent about the genocide of oppressed peoples around the world funded by our tax dollars. And here, let me please shout out the incredible Spelman students and AUC siblings who have been organizing with Stop Cop City and Justice in Palestine, among many other troublemakers in this room. You all remind us that college is not a waiting room to enter the real world, but that you can start transforming that world right here, right now.

Supporting Student Activists

It goes without saying, but let me just say it anyway, for student activists speaking out courageously for Palestine and Congo and Haiti and to Stop Cop City, they should not be threatened with expulsion, loss of scholarship, or have public safety calls on them for protesting. Too often, our institutions celebrate student activists after they’ve graduated, even giving them honorary degrees, but stifle student activism while we are enrolled. We can do better.

Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams

To close then, as we turn our attention to the founders of Spelman College who dared to dream beyond the oppressive systems that sought to limit their opportunities, to limit their imagination, and crush their spirits 143 years ago, let’s also time travel in the other direction, opening a portal 143 years into the future to the students and faculty and staff who will gather in Sister’s Chapel in the year 2167. We are, after all, their ancestors. So then, what kind of sister ancestors are we going to be? Successful and compliant?

Or purposeful and courageous? That is, we are our descendants’ wildest dreams. Each of us has the privilege and responsibility of answering that for ourselves, honestly and joyously. With that, thank you, thank you, thank you for this incredible honor.

Ruha Benjamin’s Speech at Spelman Convocation 2024 (Transcript)