On the last night of my sophomore year, several roommates and I decided to mark our halfway point at Cornell with a night of revelry. This was our graduation from underclass to upperclass, from campus to Collegetown, and dammit, we were going to live it up.
We threw someone’s bicycle into the gorge, bought a six-dollar cigar that wasn’t all too good and smashed a printer with baseball bats, a la Office Space. We even crashed some strangers’ toga party. Nothing could live up to that debauched night, so I’ve generally accepted that Commencement would be a rather boring postscript to college. When my friend called me and said, “We have a problem with graduation,” I thought about hanging up. I really couldn’t care less.
We had been planning a cocktail brunch for our families for graduation weekend, but the preparation had taken a turn for the lazy; none of my housemates wanted to shoulder the responsibility of ordering food from Old Man Wegmans and deciding on a time. Something probably had gone horribly awry, but how awry can brunch planning go? Worst case scenario was BK Lounge tater tots and Andre mimosas. Seems classy enough to me.
But brunch wasn’t the problem. Apparently, he said excitedly, his words crashing into each other, Soledad O’Brien was scheduled to come for Slope Day. Or not. TI’s coming for Slope Day, he corrected himself. O’Brien’s speaking at Convocation.
I was actually pretty happy to hear the news. She’s better than Martin Luther King Jr. Jr., last year’s Convocation speaker. Everyone else, I would soon learn, disagreed with me. “Soledad O’Brien?” they said quizzically, their faces contorting awkwardly. “Ew. Gross. Who did Harvard get?”
I jumped to S.O.B.’s defense. Who did people expect would come to Commencement? There’s always the politician approach. But does anyone really want to hear from Hillary Clinton? Bush or Cheney could come, but then our Convocation would become a circus. We could bring the new, “funny” Al Gore to talk about global warming and crack punchless one-liners.
Politicians weren’t the answer, but my friends still didn’t like Soledad. Someone suggested Stephen Colbert. Adam Schnabel ’07 wanted Dave Chappelle. “He’s funnier than you, and he talks about real issues,” Adam said. David Kiferbaum ’08 offered Ned “Carlos” Mencia. Basically, it seems, Cornell students want Convocation to become Comedy Central. Sounds grand.
Since nobody else could help out, I took an hour out of my usually packed schedule to mull it all over. The first name to pop into my head was Mike Tyson. Tyson, the former boxer who has said that he normally doesn’t do interviews with women unless they fornicate with him, might seem like an odd choice. But at the least, he’d be entertaining, and less hackneyed a choice than the unfunny Mencia.
I continued mulling. Could we go the alum route? Cornell has dozens of famous alumni, from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54 to world-renowned internist (and former sprint footballer) Joel Moses ’86. But Convocation isn’t about old alumni. It’s about new alumni being spawned from the loins of Cornell, emerging from Ithaca’s womb and severing the umbilical cord which has, for better or worse, attached us to our beloved Alma Mater.
I had one last idea. Remember that scene in Swingers when they’re in the diner, and it’s three in the morning, and Vince Vaughn stands up on the table and starts yelling “’Cause you’re growns up and you’re growns up and you’re growns up?” I think we need someone who can tell it like it is, who can give us the business. We could get Ron Livingston to talk about TPS reports (two Office Space references in a column = columnist running low on ideas) or Dwight Schrute to lecture us about being on-guard. Maybe Jim Maas can tell us we need to get more sleep. Some sort of life lesson about being “growns up” might be nice.
But back to Soledad. Her last name might be O’Brien, but she looks about as Irish as Shaquille O’Neal; that is to say, not very. After consulting with some sources, I found out that her dad is Irish and her mother is Afro-Cuban. She’s one of the “Top 100 Irish Americans” and People en Espanol’s 50 Most Beautiful People. In short, she’s everything and nothing at the same time.
We spend a lot of time — at Cornell, in America — tussling over race and identity. Last week, we enjoyed the antics of the Oppressively Themed Parties Scandal, which featured a Ho Plaza rally that will change absolutely nothing. Recently, the baseball world has been up in arms because of new studies showing that a record-low 9 percent of major leaguers are black. Remember the Duke lacrosse rape case? Turns out the only things that were raped were people’s reputations.
What Soledad offers then, is something different. Martin Luther King III was supposed to be about fighting for justice, about the courageous struggle for civil rights. But what came across was that King the Third is a specter of a generation past, trying to hold on to the politics of a movement that has been remarkably, though not completely, successful. MLK III was the ’60s incarnate, and he was so vigorously and unanimously rejected because he spoke for an America whose time had come and gone.
Soledad O’Brien, though, speaks to the new America. In this America, race matters, but it doesn’t have to be polarizing. The new America is a country where you can have your Spanish (or African) first name and still make it to the top, where the politics of macaca are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Soledad may not have the charisma or rock-star status of Barack Obama, but she exemplifies the same message. Unlike King, both O’Brien and Obama are self-made children of immigrants, getting by not on the name their parents gave them but in spite of it. Soledad’s a messenger of the new America, and while all the Grumbling Grannies might have a problem with it, I want to be the first to welcome her to Ithaca.
She can even crash my toga party.
Justin Weitz is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jdw42@cornell.edu [1]. Free Weitz appears alternate Wednesdays.
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[1] mailto:jdw42@cornell.edu