‘Never learn to stay silent about injustice’

Editor’s note: Author, poet, educator and advocate El Jones was awarded an honorary degree from Acadia University on May 17, 2024. Here are her remarks at the university’s spring convocation ceremony. 

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

Congratulations, graduates.

It’s wonderful to return to Acadia and to be standing on this stage and celebrate with you. I taught at Acadia at a very tumultuous time in my life. I had just started working closely with people in prison, and I was deeply involved at the time in fighting what I felt was the wrongful conviction of a young African Nova Scotian man. Every day, I heard about injustices and conditions that enraged, traumatized, and haunted me. I taught an 8:30am English class, and I would drive from Halifax to Acadia and just cry in the car. I would give myself that time to breakdown, and then get out of the car, try to hide it away, and go and teach.

I hadn’t yet learned to do what this world so often demands of us, to put aside the horrors we are witnessing, to put on a face, and to carry on as though it is normal.

I never learned – and I hope to never learn – to stay silent about injustice. And at that time of my life, fighting those battles got me rejected from so many places. I didn’t have full time work, I struggled to finish my dissertation, I frequently felt worthless and ashamed of where I was in life. And so I would imagine the day I would triumph. I would imagine moments like this, where I was being honoured, and I would think about all the things I would say in that moment to my enemies, about all the ways I would show them and get my revenge.

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

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

Over the past few months, we have been told that it is our words and not bombs that are harmful and violent. In the past few weeks we have watched students – students like you – who are standing against a genocide be beaten bloody and arrested by police called by their own universities against them, simply because they can no longer stand by and say nothing while Palestinians are murdered. This convocation is taking place at a time where every university in Gaza has been destroyed, where academics, writers, and journalists have been killed in unprecedented numbers, and where every cultural institution has been decimated.

And we are told to stay silent, to not risk our careers, or our awards, or our dinner parties, or our reputations because it is too complex to speak, or it makes others unsafe, or we might appear to be hateful.

And so, it is at this time, more than any other, that we are called upon not to say what is pleasing but what is right. It is times like now that we are tested, where the values we say our education stands for – humanism, reason, justice – are challenged, and where we must find the courage to speak, and act, and live with integrity, and compassion, and humanity.

And you will find, if you do speak, that this testing never ends. Throughout our lives, over and over, we will be asked to choose between comfort  – both ours and that of other people – 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, to keep our heads down. And over and over again, we must choose – choose to live up to our values, choose to honour our communities, choose to not lose sight of the world that we want to bring into being.

I want to leave you with one final 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 the boycott in Montgomery, people knew not to take the bus. There wasn’t social media, many people didn’t have phones. And the answer is a woman I’m sure nearly none of you have heard of, named Jo Ann Robinson. Jo Ann Robinson worked at a university, and she had access to a mimeograph machine, which was what they used before photocopiers. But with this machine, you had to stand there and crank a handle to make copies. When they voted for the boycott, she called up a colleague, and along with 2 students they stayed up all weekend printing up thousands of copies of leaflets. Then they made a plan for how to distribute these leaflets and they got them to every store, beauty salon, church, barber shop – everywhere. And that’s how people knew not to take the bus to work on Monday.

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