The Political Betrayal of the Black Academic and Professional Elite
Analyzing the 2024 Morehouse Commencement Speech as a Microcosm of Black Bourgeois' Capitulation to White Power
This past Sunday, a ceremony designed to recognize the accomplishment of earning a college degree, a ceremony reserved for the future leaders of the nation, was diminished by the self-centered intentions of University leadership and a shameless political leader. The recent graduates of Morehouse College, a historically black college and university (HBCU) founded in 1867, would have the displeasure of hosting President Joe Biden as their graduating commencement speaker.
Late in April, Morehouse President, David Thomas, announced the Morehouse graduating class of 2024 commencement speaker to be none other than the 46th President himself. This announcement was met with tamed yet vigorous pushback from a few voices of the student body during a town hall hosted by Thomas. Many voicing concern for the U.S. funded genocide of the Palestinians, where there is now a low estimate of 44,000 martyrs, referring to Biden as a war criminal. Others were concerned of ruining the reputation of their university by both inviting Biden to speak and bestowing him with an honorary doctorate degree.
There were even complaints demanding this ceremony for the students not be turned into a campaign opportunity for Joe Biden. Morehouse leadership ensured the commencement invitation was not about politics. Senior Vice-President of student affairs, Kendrick Brown expressed to ABCnews,
“The reason that we invited President Biden here, the reason we invite any speaker to come to commencement, is that we believe they have something to say to encourage our graduates as they go out into the world… I hope this speech would not be about making a case or making a campaign. It should be about our students.”
This was a portion of the pathetic reasoning as to why Morehouse leadership decided not to rescind Biden’s commencement invitation.
Even faculty voiced concern for the invitation, with one member asking if there would be any penalty for protesting. Thomas would respond “jokingly” that the only time anyone would be penalized for protesting is during the President’s commencement speech.
On the day of the graduation ceremony, Biden would warmly be received by the Morehouse alumni while receiving lackluster acts of disapproval from the graduating seniors. As the ceremony continued on to the president’s speech, few students would turn their backs to the President, others bowed their heads, one Georgia State University (GSU) graduate stood with her back turned and her fist up. However, none of that caused Biden to hesitate as he sang sweet nothings to the ears of the current and up-incoming black bourgeois class while also delivering the same genocidal propaganda that was debunked in 2023.
Following this speech, Biden would receive his honorary doctorate degree. He would procclaim in 2025 there will be a Morehouse man and an AKA in the White House. He also later expressed appreciation for how the Morehouse students conducted their protest and that he “hears them” about their concerns for Gaza.
We need to sit with that last line. The face of power that these dissenting voices were targeting with their protest was APPRECIATIVE of how calmly, peacefully, and nondisruptively (INSIGNIFICANT) their PROTEST was executed. Morehouse gave Biden a gift of docile negroes, so concerned with presentation and respectability that they very much allowed themselves to be used by the President as seen on his twitter account following the speech. Of course his appearance there would be used for his political ambitions, how could it not? However, Morehouse leadership insisted this wouldn’t be the case, and the lack of disruption gave Biden a perfect campaign event.
There are many things insulting about the commencement and the lack of resistance to this event. I’d like to start with the man who Morehouse decided to honor and confer a doctorate degree to, who Morehouse made a “Morehouse Man.”
President Biden’s history in the U.S. Senate cannot be ignored given how consistent it was even going into his role as Vice President and later President. We can start with his work and agreement with segregationists regarding student busing, claiming he did not want his kids growing up in a racial jungle in 1977, well past the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Just a few years later he would be an even more staunch supporter of the war on drugs than President Reagan, being a major proponent of differentiating punishments between crack rock and cocaine powder in 1986. He is now infamous for his writing of the 1994 Crime Bill which led to the massive boom in the incarceration rate of black men.
As President he has not made up for these genuine ills against black Americans in any material way. In the President's fact sheet for black America, Biden would display half-measures and symbolic presentations as serving the needs of black people.
Increasing black wealth by 60% is a great sell, if you don’t realize the increase of networth was from $30,000 to $45,000 (the next lowest group is $61,000), if you don’t consider the larger wealth gap between white and black Americans now compared to that of the 1970s and if you don’t consider this increase follows an economic impacting pandemic. Cutting the child poverty rate in half, is a great sell if you missed its expiration before the 2022 midterm elections (in a Democrat-controlled Congress) and missed that the child poverty rate more than doubled the following year and remains as such. Claiming to want accountability for police officers means nothing when Biden budgets $37 Billion for law enforcement and is actively arming the occupying forces in Israel that train United States police officers.
It’s who Biden is as a politician and leader that leads me to the next thing wrong with this commencement. The legacy of one of Morehouse’s most well-known and influential men of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity inc, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
MLK was a known activist against the very segregation Biden insisted on upholding after the death of King. He was also an anti-U.S. imperialist. So much so that he saw an end to his political relationship with President Lyndon Johnson for the President's abandonment of his Great Society Project (War on Poverty) and replacing it with a 20-year long, unsuccessful war in Vietnam.
King could not support Johnson nor could he encourage other members of the black community to support him as a viable leader due to his war effort. Mind you, this is after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (material changes for black Americans) and with Richard Nixon, the introducer of the southern strategy with the explicit purpose of enticing racist Dixiecrats, as a known possible Presidential option. King stood on his principles for the sake of peace and demanded an end to this war and refocus on the economic woes of the proletariat, including the black working class.
The circumstances of black America today are almost identical to that of 1967. The “ally” president is ignoring the economic and material needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized of our society in favor of multiple acts of U.S. imperialism leading to the deaths of thousands of brown people abroad. The only two differences being the current president acted as an impediment to black progress in his past and has taken no serious action in effectively addressing the plight he contributed in creating, of the average black American in the present.
Yet the black elite have thrown themselves at President Biden’s feet, thanking him for nothing and encouraging the rest of black America to be grateful for him and vote for him, fear mongering over Project 2025 or embellishing the value of meeting with various black leaders for glorified photo-ops like the recent Divine 9 president’s meeting last week. So far, the presidents of their respective National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) organizations have yet to release the details of the discussion, but if history rhymes and if patterns follow suit, there’s a high likelihood the discussion was centered more around the dangers of an unmitigated GOP governance as opposed to effective policies materially beneficial to economic security and societal dignity of the black working class.
This is nothing short of a disappointment and a huge fall from grace for our black leadership. This is where black political power is squandered. The black bourgeois leadership has found comfort in being the colorful apologists or sycophants for U.S. imperialism, settling for weak acknowledgements of black culture and limited capitalist gains as the default incremental process to black liberation. These means to address the plight of black America are insufficient considering its the prioritization of corporations and the military industrial complex that add to the suffering of the black proletariat.
Atlanta, Georgia, the city where Morehouse College is located, is ran entirely by black Democrats, yet it is also ground zero for the United States political ambitions to develop unnecessary facilities all for the purposes of training future occupiers and protectors of capital with the infamous, Cop City. This effort is funded in part by corporations such as Home Depot, to whom Morehouse and numerous HBCUs have a continued partnership with to this day.
Combining the two most recent global conflicts in which the U.S. provides weapons and monetary aid (to Nazis in Ukraine and Terrorists in Israel) to foreign nations, Biden has given over $190 Billion. $20 Billion ends homelessness in the United States. Black Americans represent a third of the growing homeless population and more than half of homeless families, but that's not a priority to our leaders, including the President.
In the case of minimum wage, black Americans make up the larger share of minimum wage workers compared to other races. However, one “no” from the Senate Parliamentary, a role that can be easily replaced by someone with a more favorable view on the policy, prevents black women (the most represented in minimum wage workers) from seeing an increase in their incomes. If black workers were a priority to our leaders, this would not be an issue to begin with.
Black Americans have been thoroughly duped by the current leaders of the black academic and professional elite into throwing our political weight behind candidates and leaders that allow for black individuals of the ruling class to prosper, selling their own version of an American dream. However, this does not have to remain the final case for the black proletariat, for it is our hands that control the production that enriches the elite and those hands are many!
For every black elitist, there’s 100+ black workers more than capable of organizing to both directly address the material conditions of their environments and coherently make demands of current and aspiring leadership. All that is required of the uncorrupted black professional class in this moment of realigning political power behind the black masses is not arrogance based on economic status or hubris due to an arbitrary degree of credibility, but humility centered around uplifting the worker class struggle as King died fighting for.