“Never learn to remain silent in the face of injustice” – New Brunswick Media Cooperative

Editor’s Note: Author, poet, educator and advocate El Jones received an honorary degree from Acadia University on May 17, 2024. Here are his remarks at the university’s spring graduation ceremony.

Good morning Chancellor, President, Members of the Board of Governors, Members of the Senate, Distinguished Guests, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Alumni, Friends and Family.

Congratulations to the graduates.

It’s wonderful to be back in Acadia, to stand on this stage and celebrate with you. I taught at Acadia during a very tumultuous time in my life. I had just started working closely with inmates and, at the time, I was deeply involved in the fight against what I considered to be the wrongful conviction of a young African Nova Scotian. Every day I heard about injustices and conditions that angered me, traumatized me, and haunted me. I taught an English class at 8:30 a.m., drove from Halifax to Acadia, and cried in the car. I would give myself that time to break down, and then I would get out of the car, try to hide it, and go teach.

I had not yet learned to do what this world so often demands of us: to put aside the horrors we witness, to grimace and pretend it was normal.

I never learned—and I hope I never learn—to remain silent in the face of injustice. And at that time in my life, fighting those battles got me rejected from so many places. I didn’t have a full-time job, I was struggling to finish my dissertation, I often felt worthless and ashamed of my situation in life. And so I would imagine the day when I would triumph. I would imagine moments like this, when I would be honored, and I would think of all the things I would say to my enemies in that moment, all the ways I would show them and get revenge.

But now here I am, standing on this stage, and of course, when you get to the point where people want to honor you, you realize one important thing: it was never about you. And all the things you thought you would say are not at all the things you want or need to say.

This winter, when I was in the UK, I attended a conference at Bloomsbury Baptist Church in London, where Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke. The speaker was Dr. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, Palestine. Dr. Isaac said something that touched me deeply. I’m not preaching to you here, I know many of you are not Christians – but Dr. Isaac asked us a powerful question. Where would we be, he asked, if Jesus only said what pleased those in power? If he only made measured statements, if he consulted all stakeholders, if he only said what could be approved by the government, the military and the institutions. Jesus didn’t say what was pleasing, Dr. Isaac reminded us, he said what was right.

In recent months, we have been told that it is our words, not the bombs, that are dangerous and violent. In recent weeks, we have seen students – students like you – who oppose genocide being beaten to death and arrested by police called upon by their own universities, simply because they can no longer stand by and say nothing while Palestinians are murdered. This ceremony comes at a time when every university in Gaza has been destroyed, when academics, writers and journalists have been killed in unprecedented numbers, and when every cultural institution has been decimated.

And we are told to stay silent, not to risk our careers, or our awards, or our dinners, or our reputation because speaking up is too complex, or because it endangers others, or because we might appear hateful.

And so it is at this moment, more than any other, that we are called to say not what is pleasant but what is right. It is a time like this when we are tested, when the values ​​we claim to defend – humanism, reason, justice – are called into question, and when we must find the courage to speak out , to act and live with integrity and compassion. and humanity.

And you will discover, if you speak up, that these tests never end. Throughout our lives, we will be repeatedly forced to choose between comfort—our own and that of others—and silence. We will be asked to learn to swallow what we know is wrong, to be the “adult in the room,” to compromise for the greater good, and to keep our heads down. And again and again, we must choose—to choose to live up to our values, to choose to honor our communities, to choose not to lose sight of the world we want to create.

I want to leave you with one last thing. I’m sure you all know who Rosa Parks is. But I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered how, when they called for a boycott in Montgomery, people knew not to take the bus. There was no social media and many people didn’t have phones. And the answer is a woman that I’m sure almost none of you have heard of named Jo Ann Robinson. Jo Ann Robinson worked at a university and she had access to a polymeograph, which is what they used before photocopiers. But with this machine, you had to stand there and pull a handle to make copies. When they voted to boycott, she called a colleague and, along with two students, they stayed up all weekend printing thousands of copies of leaflets. Then they came up with a plan on how to distribute these flyers and handed them out to every store, beauty salon, church, barbershop – everywhere. And that’s how people knew not to take the bus to work on Monday.

Many of us may imagine that we would like to be a Rosa Parks one day. But we can all be a Jo Ann Robinson right now. We can all see a need, use the resources we have, put in all our effort and work, and do what is not glamorous, what is not celebrated, and is not even seen – but what is necessary, well, well. We may go unrecognized, we may spend years wandering in darkness, despair, rage and helplessness. But those who need to know our names will know them. So let’s find our courage and not be afraid.