It really is quite lovely to be here,
and you can't imagine how honored I am
to be given this opportunity.
I thank you for giving me these few minutes.
Congratulations, of course, to the class of 2016.
I've had a chance to meet only a few of you,
but I was immediately intimidated
by their awesome achievements and
their amazing personal stories.
And I have to say, seeing you here today
and hearing just a little bit about what
you have accomplished already, well
it makes me really glad I got through college before they
raised the bar.
So listen, you're going to make history.
There's just no doubt about it.
You will do things that have never been done before.
I suspect you already have the sense that your generation has
some important work to do.
But what you may not have thought about
is how you're going to remake history.
And by that, I mean that you and your contemporaries
will literally decide what our history is.
You will decide what we will remember and honor
from our past, and what we will regret and perhaps forget.
Now remaking history is an ongoing process,
and every generation does it.
A couple of examples-- when I was a kid, General George
Armstrong Custer was a cultural hero of the United States.
Hollywood icons made movies about his heroism
and sacrifice.
Everybody my age knew about Custer
and his courageous last stand against the Sioux and Cheyenne
troops.
But somewhere along the way, we have collectively
decided that maybe Custer was not a hero,
at least in his fights with the Indians.
Another example is Christopher Columbus.
When I was a kid-- I'm not going to sing, I promise.
When I was a kid, I learned a little song about him,
a song about how Columbus sailed the ocean blue to find
this land for me and you.
When I got older, I learned that there
was more to know about Columbus and that he
was a slaver and a killer.
Now we know about Columbus.
And again, we are deciding collectively
that perhaps we should not be celebrating Columbus Day.
And I was very pleased to see that Brown
has joined the institutions and communities that now celebrate
Indigenous Peoples Day.
[APPLAUSE]
Now these are not small matters.
Back in the 1960s, during my childhood,
the American history that was agreed upon
was that American history began only when Columbus
discovered the New World.
Two entire continents of undeveloped wilderness
populated only by a few wandering hunter-gatherers,
whose elimination was in equal parts
unnecessary, dangerous, and tragic.
And I can tell you, I never learned
anything in my public school education
that made me proud of my Native American ancestors.
Now like all of you, I knew I was a smart kid,
but the Indians I was learning about in school
seemed dumb and primitive.
The racial messages that I took from my schooling
were so powerful.
I knew I was an Indian, but I literally
wondered whether the reason I was smart
was that my mother was white.
Now fortunately, I had parents who helped me understand,
and of course, I got the opportunity
to study at one of the world's great universities
and realized that these American origin
stories that I was learning had arisen
from some very old and very wrong
ideas about culture, religion, and race.
And now, I work at the Smithsonian, the largest museum
complex in the world.
And I have as a mission to bring about the day
when no little kid, regardless of background,
who learns the history of our country
will ever feel the way that I did.
This becomes particularly urgent because my wife Anne Marie
and I just gained a new grandson,
and his name is Osamequin.
Like his older brother and sister,
Osamequin is Comanchian Pawnee.
He is English and Scots-Irish.
He is Korean.
He is African American.
And he is Paiute and Wampnoag.
I want him to know about all of his ancestry,
and I want him to revel in it and accept it and be
grateful for all of it.
Now with your help, we can make an American history
that is introspective, inclusive,
and rigorously honest.
And if we do that, I believe we'll
find that this new history is amazing,
far more than the anodyne narratives
that are still being taught in our schools.
So let us consider a few American origin myths.
These are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
So they say as much about how we think
of ourselves as they tell us about how
we think of our ancestors.
Some of our favorite origin stories
have Indians in them-- pilgrims, Plymouth,
and the first Thanksgiving, the Jamestown colony
and Pocahontas, Lewis and Clark in his core of discovery,
and Sacajawea, and the Trail of Tears.
Now, as Americans, we continually
revisit our origin stories.
Historians are constantly giving us
more information to work with.
We then sift this information through
our modern sensibilities, and we decide again
just what our history is.
As our nation changes, our stories change.
And this is important work and we should do it well.
And if we are to do it well, we really
must strive to know what the heck we are talking about when
we are discussing American history, unlike
say the presidential candidate who made clear
this week that he thinks it's funny to mock a United States
senator by calling her Pocahontas.
Now, you all are about the right age
to have grown up on the Disney movie Pocahontas.
The imaginary Pocahontas who rescued John Smith, and she
wore a buckskin cocktail dress.
She talked to her animal friends.
But of course, that's an imaginary Pocahontas.
The real Pocahontas was a child.
She was 11 years old when the Jamestown colony was founded.
She was kidnapped and held for ransom by the English.
She eventually married and became Rebecca Rolfe.
She had a child Thomas Rolfe, and sadly she
died only a few years later in England at the age of 22.
Now, Pocahontas left a weird legacy
that tells us something important about our country.
It turns out that many of Virginia's first families
labored mightily to establish that they were descended
from Thomas Rolfe and Pocahontas because she was,
u all, a princess.
She was royalty in the eyes of the English.
Four of our first US presidents--
four of our first six US presidents--
were from Virginia.
So these first families of Virginia,
somehow, it made them more American to establish
their descendancy from Pocahontas.
Now this became problematic a couple of centuries later.
Virginia, of course, was very much a part of Jim Crow.
And in the 1920s, they were refining their Jim Crow laws.
Now under Virginia law, there were only two kinds of people.
There were white people, and there were colored people.
And if you were not entirely white, you were colored.
Needless to say, colored people enjoyed fewer rights,
privileges, and opportunities than white people.
And this was an idee-- this was a policy that arose directly
out of ideas like to avoid miscegenation,
to literally practice eugenics.
And this was the policy of one of our important states.
They're reforming their laws in the 1920s,
to make them a little tougher, and they
realized that because they had included Native Americans
in the colored category and because they
had adopted the so-called one drop rule, that no matter how
far in the past your Native American or African
American ancestry was, you were still colored.
And they realized that they had just
turned colored many of the first families of Virginia, who
had established themselves by their own admission
as descendants of Pocahontas.
Well, this was unacceptable, and so they immediately
enacted a new law that said, well,
if you're only 1/16 or less Indian, Native American,
then you too can be white.
This was known as the Pocahontas Exception.
Fast forward again to a woman named Mildred.
Mildred was a descendant of the Rappahannock Indians,
but she did not qualify for the Pocahontas Exception
because she was also African-American.
She fell in love with a man named Richard Loving.
The Lovings were arrested for living together
as wife and husband under Virginia's miscegenation laws,
but they decided to fight.
And a few years later in 1967, the Supreme Court
heard their case and invalidated the prohibition
on interracial marriage in Virginia.
Now that's a great story.
That's an American story.
It's an epic, with a love story to boot.
A heroic journey towards a more perfect union.
And in a way, a personal story for me
because it means that my wife Anne Marie and I could live
unmolested in the Commonwealth of Virginia,
where only 50 years ago the law said that she is white
and I am colored, and we may not love one another.
This is a story which to paraphrase the great James
Baldwin is as long and as large, as beautiful and as terrible,
as American history itself and as America itself.
The stories we tell from now on must be about all of us.
And in this work, we must not settle for simple constructs.
It is not about heroes and villains,
and we should not seek to erase those of whom we disapprove.
We can find something to dislike in all
of our noteworthy historical figures,
but we should not let our dislikes
blind us to their merits.
We must instead be humble in our opinion and our judgments
about history, about politics and policy,
and even about art and science.
Now, I know that's going to be hard for some of you
because you're young and strong, smart, good looking,
so why should you be humble?
Well, here's why.
As you heard earlier, you may know a lot, but what you know
is dwarfed by what you do not know.
And I'm sorry to say, it gets worse.
Because I know the more I learn, the more I can see
I have not yet learned.
And I remember being wrong once.
It's okay.
[LAUGHTER]
I remember that time I was wrong.
About 15 years ago, my teenage son
asked me if the United States would ever have
an African-American President.
Well, I answered confidently.
I said, oh sure, not in my lifetime,
but yeah, that's going to happen someday.
I have never been so happy to be so wrong about something
that I genuinely believed.
[APPLAUSE]
So I go on, knowing that 50 years from now,
some smart college kid is going to read something
that I've written or said and think, look at this fool.
How could he possibly have believed that?
Now that I think about it, some of you
may be thinking that right now.
But that's OK, as long as you always
hold open the real possibility that you too are wrong.
So that's it.
Your parents, your professors, your colleagues,
they are so proud of you.
They love you, and they trust you.
We will be leaving this world to you in due course,
and we are counting on you to make a good world
for our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren,
and for all of our descendants.
So class of 2016, congratulations.
Now go and change the world.
[APPLAUSE]