Professor Sweet has taught African and
African Diaspora History in the
department since 2004. His path-breaking scholarship emphasizes slavery, race, and
nation in their broader Atlantic
World context. He is the author of two
award-winning books, "Recreating Africa:
Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the
African-Portuguese World, 1441 to 1770"
and most recently, "Domingos Álvares,
African Healing, and the Intellectual
History of the Atlantic World." In addition to
his research and teaching, Professor
Sweet recently completed a three-year
term as Chair of the History Department and,
as I mentioned, he's delivering his
commencement address upon the
recommendation of the Undergraduate
History Class of 2017. I could add one
more personal remark. Jim and I, a few years
ago, realized that some sixty or seventy years ago,
our grandfathers were probably in the
same tiny rural Florida town at the
same time. This is, even today, a one-stop-like
town. I can't imagine what it was like when our
grandfathers were young. But it is a small
world. I'd like to welcome Professor
Jim Sweet. -- [applause] --
It still stunk that you guys picked me to do this. What's wrong with you? -- [laughter] --  I'm
serious. I'm used to, you know, the last couple of years
it was I think John Hall and Lou
Roberts. Yeah, my mic is on. Thank you, Scott. I love you. -- [laughter] --
I really am deeply honored. It was John
Hall. It was Lou Roberts. Those are people who
I look up to as colleagues and as teachers,
real teachers. I don't see myself in that
league, but I'm going to try to do my
best here today. I really can't think of
a greater honor and it's fun for me to be able to speak to you guys one last time, so thanks
for giving me the opportunity. Parents,
you've already heard and you're probably
horrified to learn that your kids chose
me to be the commencement speaker
primarily because I taught a class
called "Drunk History." -- [laughter] -- Before you run to
your state legislator or CNN, I point
out that almost half of the students in
that class ended up submitting their
papers for publications or prizes. A
couple of which you saw just given. Among
the things I love about history, it
teaches us to turn absurdity into
opportunity, madness into grace. These are
lessons that I try to impart to my
students every chance I get
Let me explain why. I grew up in a
working-class neighborhood in North
Carolina with my mother and two younger
brothers. My father wasn't around. Few of my
role models had earned college degrees.
They were electricians, roofers, truck
drivers, bartenders, secretaries, and store
clerks, but they were also our football
coaches, our Sunday school teachers, and
our mentors. They urged us to succeed. We
were a strong tight-knit community, but
there was also a lot of pain and
suffering in the community
I grew up in: alcoholism, drug abuse, suicides,
young people committing suicide. A majority of 
my friends followed their parents into
the trades or service industries, but too
many of them ended up addicted, in jail,
or dead.
I carry those people with me always when
I teach. When I went to University of
North Carolina as a freshman, I intended
to study business. Like STEM today,
business was the sensible surefire way
to get a job upon graduation, and I wanted
to make money. After slogging my way
through introductory accounting and
statistics,
I was bored out of my mind and I hated
the rich entitled kids in my classes -- [laughter] -- so
I changed majors to political science. I wasn't sure what I would do with a political science degree either,
but the classes stoked my
imagination and had an urgent relevance to
the world I lived in. In the summers, I
went home and worked in a textile mill
that taught me decisively what I did not
want to do for the rest of my life.
During the school year, as a part of my
financial aid package, I was assigned a
work-study job in the History Department.
I collected and distributed faculty mail,
circulated  job opening announcement for
graduate students, built bookshelves for
faculty members, and so on. I also spent a
lot of idle time doing crossword puzzles
or sleeping with my head on the desk.
One day the Chair of the History
Department wandered by and saw a typed
paper sitting next to my head. He grabbed
it and told me to
follow him into his office. After reading
the five-page paper that I had written
on the Sandinista Revolution, he
told me he was surprised that I could
write and I wasn't as dumb as I looked. -- [laughter] --
As I neared graduation with few
prospects, I told him I was planning to
enlist in the military. Both my
grandfathers and my father had served in
the military. It was honorable work,
paid decently, and would allow me to see
the world. My mentor told me flatly, "You
can't go into the military. You'll die." I tried to
convince him that I was good with a gun
but he wasn't hearing it in honest.
So instead of going to Kuwait or Iraq, I went to law school, for a year. There, I found
myself reading history and philosophy,
when I should have been studying case
law. So I moved back into my old room in
my mom's house. I worked full-time at the
airport, traveled to Europe and Latin
America with the money I earned, and
went back to school to get my teaching
certificate to teach high school. I
taught at West Charlotte High School for a
year. I loved reading and teaching history,
but I was more of a social worker in
that setting than I was a teacher. I
became frustrated. So, I applied to go to
graduate school, working with the same
mentor who had showed an interest in
me six years earlier. I had no idea
how academia worked, but Colin Palmer 
gave me an opportunity and I never looked
back.
Altogether, it took me three years after
graduating with my bachelor's degree to
figure out what I wanted to do and
another six years to complete my PhD.
When I finally got my first "real job," I
was 32 years old, married with a
five-year-old daughter, and $60,000 in debt.
What a loser! -- [laughter] --
Parents, this is for you. The trajectory
I've just laid out for you is probably your worst
nightmare, but I would implore you to be
patient with your kids. Trust yourselves
and the ways you and your communities
raised them. For our part, those of us
who've taught your kids history for the
past four, maybe five, six years, please
know that we've taught them far more
than names and dates, or even those
literacy and critical thinking skills
that my colleague there, Boswell, was so
rightly talking about earlier. If we've
done our jobs well, and I think we have, we've also
endowed them with habits of mind like
respect, vulnerability, compassion, and
particularly leadership. The material
details of history may disappear in
their minds, but these habits will
continue long after they leave UW and
will serve them in whatever occupation they
eventually choose. More importantly, these
dispositions will make them informed,
responsible, fully engaged global
citizens. History teaches us to be
restless, to assess the world with a
critical discernment that is increasingly
absent today. This restlessness, the
desire to reconcile the irreconcilable,
will help your kids pursue their
passions, turning them into leaders,
thirsty for knowledge for the rest of
their lives.
Eventually this will pay. I promise you.
If you need some evidence, there's a recent  Wall
Street Journal article. It showed that
median salaries for history majors, ten
years past their degrees, are on par with
those who have biology degrees, business
degrees... business degrees... -- [laughter] --  information
technology degrees, and nursing degrees.
Well seventy-two, seventy-three thousand dollars
ten years in, today, not a bad prospect. Graduates, you are entering a world of
utter fantasy and make-believe, a world
where Andrew Jackson was witness to the
Civil War -- [laughter] -- and Frederick Douglass is going to be your next speaker. I promise you. -- [laughter] --
It may seem as though your history degree is some kind of cruel hoax but, trust me, it's not.
It's more valuable in 2017 than it ever has been.
I commend you for your courage in
choosing a major that will serve, not simply to get you a job, but
which will serve to cultivate your whole
person. We desperately need your
leadership now. Why... I mean it should be
obvious why. -- [laughter] -- Some of us go through our
daily lives believing we are the center
of our own universes, self-contained vessels
of moral clarity and intellectual
certitude, positioned far above the
ignorance and stupidity that surround us.
I'm not naming names. Some of them like
to call themselves leaders. I think all of
us suffer from this form of selfish
hubris from time to time, go through the
tasks of our daily lives like robots,
passing through time in our solitary
default mode, prisoners of routine and owners
of the only facts that matter: ours. 
History has taught us better, but we still
make mistakes, all of us. I would urge
you to consciously cultivate the forms
of discernment you've learned in the
classroom in your daily lives. When I was
on my way to Washington a few weeks ago
for meetings for the AHA, I was in my
aisle seat early, as others were boarding the plane. First,
one young person, then five minutes later another one, each wearing very large
backpacks (it was spring break time), these
large obnoxious backpacks. They
walked down the aisle and pivoted quickly
in the aisle, bashing my head like a
piñata.
Both were busy texting on their cell
phones and they past their assigned seats so
they were turning to go back. I wanted
vengeance. -- [laughter] --
But, how how do I know that those kids weren't
coming back from a miserable holiday
spent squabbling with relatives or
leaving to visit a dying grandmother?
Moreover, how do I know I didn't
perform some similar bad or negligent
behavior myself when I got on the plane?
Maybe someone was offering me a moment
of grace as I was contemplating dragging
the offending backpackers off the plane
(planes are a bad metaphor these days). -- [laughter] -- But my point is that the
routines of everyday life often numb us to our
shared condition, pushing us
further inward. We retreat to our
televisions, our video games, our
smartphones. Walking across campus here and you go outside and witness this right now, I
guarantee it, you'll see three or four
people walking down the sidewalk
together, clearly a group of friends, and
they're all texting. Are you texting one
another? Other people? When we avoid real
meaningful human conversation and
connection, we imagine that we can insulate
ourselves from grief, shame, heartbreak,
fear. In fact, we're doing just the opposite. By denying our
vulnerabilities, we also wall off joy,
creativity, love, and happiness. There's
something beautiful,
I would even say sacred, in the
fellowship of shared boredom, pain, and
disgust. It's very difficult to do and every
once in a while, I actually try to laugh
when someone flips me off in traffic
or elbows me aside in a security line in
the airport. Why? Because these
interventions jolt me out of my mind-dumbing routines, reminding me of the
foibles, faults, and errors that make us
collectively human. There's a certain
obsurge humor to being caught all
together in this funny matrix, yet trying
our dead level best to remain inside
our little bubbles, avoiding contact or
collision.
These points of connection, however crude
or uncomfortable, draw us closer
together and make our lives infinitely
more interesting. Now, don't misunderstand
me. I'm not suggesting that you shoot your
gross injustice or abuse, only that
you should aim to understand the broader
structures that create
the forces of injustice. All of us value
tolerance in the broadest sense, but
simply opposing intolerance is not
enough. Intolerance begins as a 
collection of individual choices, aimed
at those we fear, those we perceive to
be our enemies. We must strive to make
choices, and they are choices, that free
us from blind certainty and
self-centeredness. It takes extraordinary
discipline to step outside of our tiny
skull-sized worlds to cultivate the
kind of empathic awareness and
collective group orientations that
history teaches. We achieve this common
connection, this sense of recognition and
belonging, by opening
ourselves up and searching for goodness
in those who slight us, anger us, or call
us their enemies. The key to strong
leadership is the empowerment of others,
even the people we don't like.
Of course leadership also requires the
constant celebration of our families, our
teachers, our mentors, and our friends,
those whose shoulders we stand upon. You
can begin by honoring the sacrifices of
the people who got you to this point,
some of them are probably sitting right
next to you. Let me say this again, honor
the sacrifices of those who got you here.
Thank them, elevate them, and as many
others in the world as you can. It may take
you a lifetime, as it seems to be
taking me, but the challenges are
worthwhile. Drawing inspiration from
others and sharing in our collective
successes is what makes us whole, makes us
human, makes real history. Thank you again
for the honor. Go lift somebody up. -- [applause]
