The dominant theme of George Washington University’s Commencement of 2023 sounded loud and clear: Graduates must use what they have learned to make the world a better place—the same mindset that Commencement speaker Bryan Stevenson has used to guide his storied, professional life as an advocate for justice.
Stevenson told graduates Sunday that their identity will change. “For the rest of your life,” he said, “there will be these letters behind your name,” adding that he hoped graduates would further identify themselves by being compassionate and kind.
“You can be a teacher, but if you are a compassionate teacher, if you are a dedicated teacher, you will change lives,” he said, and the same applies to nurses, lawyers, engineers and other professions.
“Proximity is key to our capacity to understand things we need to understand to make the world healthier,” he said. “When you're proximate to the poor and the excluded, the neglected, the disfavored, you will hear things you won't otherwise hear. You'll see things you won't otherwise see.”
Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization, and author of “Just Mercy,” has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners since 1985.
When he first went to law school, he said, he struggled until he took a course that required him to interact with prisoners.
“I discovered that in too many parts of this country, we have a legal system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” he said.
But proximity is not enough, he said, urging graduates to push back against narratives rooted in fear and anger. He mentioned the harmful narratives surrounding race in the United States, which have too often encouraged the privileged to blight the lives of Indigenous, Black and other people.
“The greatest evil of American slavery was the narrative that we created to justify slavery,” he said. “Enslavers didn’t want to feel immoral or unjust or un-Christian, so they made up this false narrative that Black people aren’t as good as white people.
“You can be a doctor or a lawyer, a nurse, a teacher, an engineer, a business leader,” Stevenson said, “but if you are Black or brown, you will go places in this country where you have to navigate a presumption of dangerousness and guilt.”
It is not possible to ignore the truth and heal the injuries caused by a history of injustice, he said. “You cannot skip the truth and get to reconciliation.” He pointed to other societies, such as today’s Germany, where reckoning with dark aspects of history (in Germany, the Holocaust) is compulsory for schoolchildren.
Human nature being what it is, he acknowledged, we must work against the instinct to retreat into the comfort of our own groups. And it is important to stay hopeful, he added, because “hopelessness is the enemy of justice.”
Apart from being alumni of a “great university,” Stevenson told graduates, “I think you can do more, if you work on an identity rooted in love and compassion, if you create proximity to those who are suffering, if you change narratives, if you stay hopeful, if you do the uncomfortable things.”