Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you've gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them.
Barack Obama
Morehouse College Commencement 2013, 2013
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This was the most controversial passage of the speech — a Black president telling Black graduates to stop making excuses, while acknowledging that racism and the legacy of slavery hadn't vanished. Obama threaded the needle carefully: 'Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely. They have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist. We know those are still out there.' But the argument was pragmatic, not dismissive. In a 'hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil,' the market didn't care about your backstory. He invoked the Morehouse fraternity creed: 'Excuses are tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.' Then he named the lineage these men inherited — Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. — men who 'knew full well the role that racism played in their lives' but 'had no time for excuses.'
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