essay about life is like a race

Mental Branch

a space for bookworms

Do things at your own pace. life's not a race - quote and reflection.

DO THINGS AT YOUR OWN PACE: LIFE'S NOT A RACE

In today's fast-paced world, it is easy to get caught up in the rat race, constantly striving to achieve more, accomplish goals, and keep up with others. However, in this pursuit, we often forget the significance of moving at our own pace. Life is not a race, but a journey of self-discovery and growth. In this article, we will explore the importance of embracing your own pace, the benefits it brings, and practical ways to do so.

If you want to see 37 Quotes That Will Inspire You to Overcome Challenges click here

Understanding the Pressure to Keep Up

In a society that values productivity and competition, there is immense pressure to keep up with the expectations of others. The fear of falling behind and the desire to succeed can lead to burnout, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. It's essential to recognize that each individual has a unique path to follow, and comparing oneself to others can be detrimental to personal growth.

Embracing the Journey of Self-Discovery

Instead of focusing solely on the destination, it is vital to appreciate the journey of self-discovery. Life presents numerous opportunities for learning and personal development, and each experience contributes to our growth. Embracing your own pace allows you to savor these moments, helping you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you.

The Benefits of Moving at Your Own Pace

a. Improved Mental Well-Being: By avoiding the constant pressure to keep up with others, you can reduce stress and anxiety. Embracing your own pace allows for a more relaxed and content mindset.

b. Enhanced Productivity: Surprisingly, moving at your own pace can enhance productivity. When you focus on what truly matters to you, you can prioritize tasks and work more efficiently.

c. Fulfillment and Satisfaction: By setting realistic goals and achieving them at your own pace, you'll experience a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.

Overcoming External Expectations

Society often imposes expectations on us, such as getting a high-paying job, starting a family, or achieving specific milestones by a certain age. However, it's crucial to remember that these expectations might not align with your unique desires and aspirations. Learning to overcome external pressures and defining your own path is essential in living a fulfilling life.

Cultivating Self-Compassion

As you embrace your own pace, it's essential to practice self-compassion. Be kind to yourself and recognize that it's okay to face challenges and setbacks. Treat yourself with the same level of understanding and support that you would offer to a friend. Self-compassion fosters resilience and allows you to bounce back stronger after difficulties.

Setting Realistic Goals

Setting realistic goals is a key component of living life at your own pace. Break down your ambitions into smaller, achievable steps, and celebrate each milestone along the way. This approach will help you stay motivated and prevent feelings of overwhelm.

Learning to Say No

In a fast-paced world, it's easy to get caught up in numerous commitments. However, it's important to remember that you can't do everything, nor should you. Learning to say no to activities or responsibilities that don't align with your priorities is essential in creating a balanced and fulfilling life.

Seeking Support from Like-Minded Individuals

Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals who appreciate the concept of living life at their own pace can provide invaluable support. Joining communities or support groups focused on personal growth and self-discovery can be uplifting and empowering.

Things get easier when you realize life is not a race!

To sum up, embracing your own pace is a transformative approach to life. Recognize that life is not a race but a beautiful journey filled with experiences, growth, and self-discovery. By understanding the significance of moving at your own speed, you can experience improved mental well-being, enhanced productivity, and a deeper sense of fulfillment. Let go of external expectations, set realistic goals, and cultivate self-compassion as you embark on this liberating journey. Remember, life is meant to be savored, not rushed. So, take a step back, breathe, and embrace the beauty of living life on your terms.

Recent Posts

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Review, Summary, Analysis & Much More

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley poston - Review, Summary, Analysis & Much More

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville - Review, Summary, Analysis & Much More

Sign up for our Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter for handpicked book recommendations, valuable tips, and honest reviews.

Thanks for submitting!

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

About the Author

PAULA M. L. MOYA, is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a 2019-20 Fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral Sciences.

Moya’s teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, American cultural studies, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and U.S. Latinx studies.

She is the author of  The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism  (Stanford UP 2016) and  Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles  (UC Press 2002) and has co-edited three collections of original essays,  Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century  (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010),  Identity Politics Reconsidered  (Palgrave 2006) and  Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism  (UC Press 2000). 

Previously Moya served as the Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of English, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and also the Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. 

She is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, the Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Clayman Beyond Bias Fellow. 

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Helpful Free Resources
• Happiness & Fun
• Healthy Habits
• Love & Relationships
• Mental Health
• Mindfulness & Peace
• Purpose & Passion
• Fun & Inspiring
• Submit a Post
• Books & Things
• Tiny Buddha’s Breaking Barriers to Self-Care

“Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.”  ~Chuang Tzu

At an early age I learned that nothing in life is guaranteed. When I was eleven years old, a close friend and classmate lost his battle with cancer. After that, I had several more instances of losing loved ones , some expected, others not so much.

After having gone through so much loss at such an early age, my outlook on life was one word: rushed .

I wanted to get through college as fast as I could, while taking on as much as I could. I wanted to have meaningful relationships and foster my athletic abilities. I wanted to get out into the real world and have a great job where I felt like I mattered, and made a difference .

I had graduated college a semester early, and I was blindsided by how seemingly cold the real world was and by the fact that I had all of these dreams with little to no understanding as to how they were going to come to fruition— as fast as possible .

After all, time was of the essence because I could die tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that… (What twenty-something year olds think like that?)

With the economy on the decline, I was only able to find a job at a nearby hospital as a transportation aide. This basically entailed bringing patients to and from their appointments within the hospital.

While I did enjoy certain aspects of this job, such as trying to make each and every person I transported smile during their otherwise not-so-great day, the attitudes of fellow hospital staff left me feeling worthless, as I was mocked by physicians and nurses for no other reason than my job title.

As months crept on, I became seriously devastated at the thought of my future success being delayed any further. It was hard to feel like success was on the horizon when those who were supposed to be my “teammates” were treating me so poorly.  I was genuinely distraught over the uncertainty of what tomorrow was going to bring.

I tried my very best to trudge on, with the sole thought and hope that “surely another career wouldn’t be like this, right?”

About six months later I was offered a different job. It wasn’t exactly like my previous one, but left me feeling once again like I was on another rollercoaster ride, this time with a healthcare consulting company.

When I was offered this position that would have me relocating to Pennsylvania, I packed my bags as quickly as I could. I seized the moment , not knowing when another opportunity would present itself.

In this position I had effectively transitioned from a job that required direct interaction with patients, to a role that was focused on how hospitals and medical groups financially managed themselves.

While my previous critics during my time as a transportation aide would have deemed this job title more favorable, this consulting position did not leave me feeling any better at the end of the day.   

Now, I was boots-on-the-ground implementing change within an organization, with one major problem: my boss was one of the most despised people at the hospital.

This left me putting out fires at every turn, and put me in a position where I felt forced to back certain causes I didn’t truly believe in because I was told to “step up, or step out,” by the management within the consulting company.

During this time, I was spending ten to twelve hours a day at work, getting nothing more in return than feeling emotionally and mentally drained at the day’s end.

While I did have a small group of friends in the area, I wasn’t close to any of them, as this group of individuals primarily focused on surface-level relationships and drinking.

To fill any remaining time I had available to me, I began training for an Olympic distance triathlon.

More or less, I threw all of the things that I felt I needed to achieve to feel happy in life up in the air, hoping at least one would catch, but none of them did.

My failure in this approach was that I was running—not just in a “hey, I’m training for an Olympic distance triathlon” kind of way, but in an “oh-my-gosh, I’m terrified to leave any amount of time free because if I truly take a step back and look at my life, I will realize how unhappy I am and how unimportant all of this is” kind of way.

I was cramming my days so full in an attempt to truly experience the world like my other friends and family members never had the chance to, and in doing this, I wasn’t actually experiencing anything at all.

I didn’t know who I was , and I most certainly didn’t know what I wanted.

Fast forward a year and a half and here I am, now located in Boise, Idaho, where I have relinquished “striving for happiness,” because happiness is not something you strive for.

When I moved to Idaho for another job opportunity, I decided not to fill all my downtime like I had in the past.

At first, I felt truly and utterly alone. Things were quiet, and it became apparent that in trying to experience everything around me and check items off of my bucket list, I had neglected to cope with several past experiences.

The loss of loved ones, the ending of relationships, and past decisions that did not suit me all haunted me in my downtime.

Through counseling and deep self-reflection over the past several months, I have been able to resolve many of these feelings and have learned, among other things, that happiness is something that already lies within us.

It is a personal choice, however, whether or not we allow ourselves to feel it.

I believe happiness is choosing to let go of those situations and people who do not suit us personally. It is living in the moment, rather than, in my case, living in fear that the moment is going to be over before I’m ready.

It is here that I have allowed myself to only invest time in what truly interests and suits me, rather than what I feel obligated to achieve.

I have made time to enjoy exercising, to cherish my family and friends, to read and write, and to enjoy the simplicity of life rather than stress over all of life’s complexities. In realizing how much I have missed while running from my past and planning far into the future, I have become truly present.

We all have the ability to enjoy our lives, but it can’t happen if we’re racing toward the future. If we want to be happy, we have to choose to create happiness now.

Photo by rusticus80

About Lauren Baratto

Lauren Baratto is a twenty-four year old self-proclaimed “old soul,” who strives to impact the lives of others through consistently exercising compassion, and empathy. Overly enthusiastic about the healthcare field and helping others, Lauren’s ultimate passion is writing and while she doesn’t have a blog or book just yet… she hopes to in the future….. STAY TUNED and connect at: facebook.com/lauren.bee53

Did you enjoy this post? Please share the wisdom :)

Related posts:

Free Download: Buddha Desktop Wallpaper

Recent Forum Topics

• Fake friend….or a jealous friend
• Why sometime it takes years to miss some one
• My GF keeps talking about her past sex life and I don’t know why it bothers me?
• “Frenemies” and the desire for true friendship
• My one shame, letting go of snooping
• Lonely Confused Depressed and reaching the end of my rope
• Not doing well
• What do I do now?

May You Never Go Back

GET MORE FUN & INSPIRING IMAGES & VIDEOS .

Latest Posts

How to Be Brave and Speak up Early in the Conversation

The Gift of Self-Acceptance: Goodbye Filters, Hello Authentic Self

How to Stop Prioritizing Everyone and Everything Else at Your Own Expense

Rethinking Productivity: Less Hustle, More Harmony, More Energy

If You Haven’t Found Your Purpose: How to Feel Good Anyway

This site is not intended to provide and does not constitute medical, legal, or other professional advice. The content on Tiny Buddha is designed to support, not replace, medical or psychiatric treatment. Please seek professional care if you believe you may have a condition.

Tiny Buddha, LLC may earn affiliate income from qualifying purchases, including from the Amazon Associate Program.

Before using the site, please read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .

Click to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking.

Who Runs Tiny Buddha?

Get More Tiny Buddha

•   Twitter
•   Facebook
•   Instagram
•   Youtube
•   RSS Feed

Credits & Copyright

• Back to Top

inequality.com

The stanford center on poverty and inequality, search form.

• like us on Facebook
• follow us on Twitter
• See us on Youtube

Custom Search 1

• Stanford Basic Income Lab
• Social Mobility Lab
• California Lab
• Social Networks Lab
• Noxious Contracts Lab
• Tax Policy Lab
• Housing & Homelessness Lab
• Early Childhood Lab
• Undergraduate and Graduate Research Fellowships
• Minor in Poverty, Inequality, and Policy
• Certificate in Poverty and Inequality
• America: Unequal (SOC 3)
• Inequality Workshop for Doctoral Students (SOC 341W)
• Postdoctoral Scholars & Research Grants
• Research Partnerships & Technical Assistance
• Conferences
• Pathways Magazine
• Policy Blueprints
• California Poverty Measure Reports
• American Voices Project Research Briefs
• Other Reports and Briefs
• State of the Union Reports
• Multimedia Archive
• Recent Affiliate Publications
• Latest News
• Talks & Events
• California Poverty Measure Data
• American Voices Project Data
• About the Center
• History & Acknowledgments
• Center Personnel
• Stanford University Affiliates
• National & International Affiliates
• Employment & Internship Opportunities
• Graduate & Undergraduate Programs
• Postdoctoral Scholars & Research Grants
• Research Partnerships & Technical Assistance
• Talks & Events
• History & Acknowledgments
• National & International Affiliates
• Get Involved

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Reference Information

Author: .

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c 1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

How to see race

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure.

by Gregory Smithsimon   + BIO

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation .

O ccasionally there are historical moments when the creation of race and its political meaning get spelled out explicitly. The US Constitution divided people into white, Black or Indian, which were meant to stand in for power categories: those eligible for citizenship, those subjected to brutal enslavement, and those targeted for genocide. In the first census, each resident counted as one person, each slave as three-fifths a person, and each Indian was not counted at all.

But racialisation is often more insidious. It means that we see things that don’t exist, and fail to recognise things that do. The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness. The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race. An early US census instructed people to leave the race section blank if they were white, and indicate only if someone were something else (‘B’ for Black, ‘M’ for Mulatto). Whiteness was literally unmarked.

A brief aside on the politics of typography, in case you’re wondering: throughout this article I leave ‘white’ as is, but I capitalise ‘Black’, as well as ‘Indian’ and ‘Irish’. Why? Well, as the writer and activist W E B DuBois said in the early 20th century, during the decades-long campaign to capitalise ‘Negro’: ‘I believe that 8 million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.’ I could argue that I don’t capitalise white because ‘white’ rarely rises to the level of a cultural identification – but the real reason I don’t is because race is never fair, so it’s fitting for inequality be written into the words we use for races.

Putting whiteness under inspection shows how powerful race is, despite the instability of racial categories. For decades, ‘whiteness’ was an explicit standard for citizenship. (Blacks could technically be citizens, but enjoyed none of the legal benefits. Asians born outside the US were prohibited from becoming citizens until the mid-20th century.) Eligibility for citizenship – painted as whiteness – has remained a category since its inscription in the Constitution, but those eligible for membership in that group have changed. Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white. What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons are notorious in this regard. His caricatures of Irishmen and Blacks are particularly shocking because they are a type we no longer see today. Working-class Irishmen are represented as chimpanzees in crumpled top hats and curled-up shoes. Their faces have a large dome-shaped upper lip surrounded by bushy sideburns:

At times, Nast partnered the Irishman with an equally offensive image of a Black American, with big ‘Sambo’-style lips, perhaps a large rump and clunky bare feet. Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Unless, perhaps, they meet a man named O’Connor with red hair, Americans today rarely think to themselves: ‘Of course! He looks Irish.’

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . Not all white people look the same

But Nast was not only sketching nasty caricatures of Irishmen; he was doing so in a way that would appear believable to his audience. In a similar example of invisible ethnicity, 15 per cent of Americans in 2014 reported German heritage. This ethnic group is widespread and numerous. So let me pose a simple question: what do German Americans look like? One in seven Americans are German American; how many of the German Americans you meet have you identified that way? Even more so than later immigrant groups such as Italian, Irish or Jewish, German is invisible.

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . It’s not the case that all white people look the same. My parents are both of predominantly Irish heritage. One summer, my family was travelling and had a layover in Ireland long enough for us to see the city of Dublin for the first time. We had not left the airport before my seven-year-old son said what I was already thinking: ‘Everybody here looks like grandma and grandpa!’ My family, according to my seven-year-old, looked like people from Ireland.

A few years later, I was to meet a French colleague at a busy Paris train station at rush hour, but neither of us knew what the other one looked like, and there were hundreds of people. I tried to guess which of the women entering, exiting, waiting, smoking, texting and milling about was the person I was to meet, but to no avail. Then I turned, and from a block away, through a crowd of hundreds, a woman waved directly at me. She had picked me out. I had been vaguely aware, before then, that no matter how familiar I got with Paris, I stood out on the subway: I might feel perfectly French riding the train, reading the advertisements in French and understanding the conductor, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, I knew my face was different from the diverse visages I saw in public.

Later I asked my colleague, and she said she knew I wasn’t French. How so? I asked. She scrutinised me. ‘ La mâchoire .’ It was your jaw, she said, with a satisfied smile. Until that day, I never knew there was such a thing as an Irish chin, but I had one. And no doubt, if Nast ever met my earliest American ancestors on the street, he’d know they looked Irish too. We don’t see Irish anymore, we don’t recognise it, we no longer caricature it. But we could.

T he racial category of Asian is just as unstable and entangled with political power as whiteness is. The US census started counting ‘Chinese’ back in 1870 (with no other category for people from the continent of Asia). Around the same time, the census started counting a similarly excluded group, American Indians, which the Constitution had designated as ripe for expropriation. Tellingly, Indian racial categories were unstable from the start: after not being counted at all, Indians were then included but tallied in the ‘white’ column – except in areas where there were large numbers of Indians, where they became their own category.

For Asians, as Paul Schor points out in his fascinating history Counting Americans (2017), the US government counted Chinese and Japanese but still left the rest of Asia blank, adding ‘Filipino, Hindu, and Korean’ in the 20th century. For something so clearly created by people, lists of racial groups are never comprehensive and typically ill-defined. Looking across the Eurasian continent, the US government today is still vague about where white ends and Asian begins. People in the US who were born east of Greece and west of Thailand are often unsure which boxes to check in the US census every 10 years. Like storm-borne waves or wind-blown sand dunes, race is a daunting obstacle that shifts and changes.

During the Second World War, China was a US ally, while Japan was an enemy. The US military decided it necessary to identify racial differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. In a series of cartoon illustrations, they tried to educate American soldiers about what to look for – what to see – in order to distinguish a Japanese solider who might be trying to blend in among a Chinese population.

Today, the ‘How to Spot a Jap’ leaflets are an offensive novelty – used either to illustrate the history of racist stereotyping or sold on postcards as ironic curiosities. But they can also be examined in another way. In The Civilizing Process (1978), the sociological theorist Norbert Elias studied books on manners from the European Renaissance to understand the process of the creation of what he called habitus . Manners that we see as utterly natural and inevitable today, like not blowing one’s nose at the table, or eating off the serving spoon, or belching or farting in public, are, in fact, socially constructed and learned behaviours.

At the historical moment at which they were introduced, books of manners were required to teach what is today utterly obvious to adults. They make for incredible reading. In his chapter ‘On Blowing One’s Nose’, for instance, Elias quotes a ‘precept for gentlemen’ that matter-of-factly explains: ‘When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.’ ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.’ ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth.’ Some of the recommendations are as poetic as they are graphic: ‘Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’ It appears that actions that seem completely natural had to be taught explicitly.

Genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics

The ‘How to Spot a Jap’ flyers were printed to serve much the same function as the manners books that Elias studied. They tried to create and implant a racial habitus that distinguished the Japanese from the Chinese. That Second World War poster looks offensive today – crude, reductionist, insulting – and it is. We think that recognising such ridiculousness makes us less racist than the people who made it. It doesn’t. It merely means that we have different racial categories than in 1942.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time. Most Americans cannot distinguish a white American of Irish origin versus one of French origin walking down the street, yet they hardly need pamphlets explaining what to look for to tell if someone is white or Black. If the distinction between Japanese and Chinese had remained as significant in the US today as it was to US soldiers during the Second World War, many people would see it as similarly self-evident.

On-the-street racial distinctions don’t have to be ‘perfect’. People often don’t recognise the author Malcolm Gladwell as Black, although he is; other times whites are mistaken for Blacks. For the purposes of making or unmaking a racial difference, genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics. The same two groups can be visibly different racially or indistinguishable racially, depending on the political context and power relations by which they’re categorised.

F rancis Galton was a pioneer in modern statistics. But he was also a eugenicist. Among other things, Galton became notorious for photos in the late 19th century that purported to reveal the ‘Jewish type’. At the time, people believed that Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese or German denoted races. When Jews were a race, people thought that they could tell who was Jewish by looking at them. Today, many Jewish people recoil at the idea that there is a Jewish ‘race’, and find the suggestion that there is a Jewish ‘look’ inherently racist. At various times, then, the US Army, Thomas Nast and the father of the statistical method of regression analysis all believed that there were visually distinct and observable races that many Americans today would be generally unable to identify – certainly not with the level of certainty they’d feel with respect to racial categories such as Caucasian, African American, Latino or Asian.

I suspect that a visitor from a planet without race would have a very difficult time slotting anyone on Earth into the racial categories we use today. If they were asked to group people visually, there is no statistical possibility that they’d use the same set of arbitrary boxes, and even if these categories were described for them in detail, they would probably not sort actual people in the same way as the modern US does.

That we think we see race naturally, when in fact it’s socially constructed, is the third eye through which we see the world. The census prediction that the US will be majority minority is less a conclusion than a question: ‘What future will immigrants of colour build in the US?’ The answer involves not just changes that transpire between one group and another, but changes to the membership of those groups and their symbolic meaning. In response to demographic shifts, the very boundaries of whiteness are likely to shift, as indeed they’ve done before.

In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa

In The History of White People (2011), Nell Irvin Painter argues that the idea of ‘whiteness’ has expanded several times to include more and more people. First came the Irish and previously ‘suspect’ non-Protestants, who ‘gained’ whiteness in the late 1800s. The next great expansion of whiteness came with the social upheaval and physical relocation of both servicemen and migrating industrial workers during the Second World War. In the war economy, groups including Italians, Jews and Mexicans became upwardly mobile, and sought to present themselves in allegiance with Anglo-Saxon beauty ideals (the only Jewish Miss America was crowned in 1945) – all of which helped to recast them as ‘white’. The narrative of white inclusivity continued from the Roosevelt era into the postwar period. Finally, intermarriage eventually dissolved previous notions of racial boundaries. Few white Americans could claim a single national race (Swedish, German, French) with any confidence, and whiteness could no longer sustain the idea of nation-based races. For Painter, this most recent change closed the book on any scientific basis for race, and helped to make the US a country where people are much more mixed, across old racial boundaries, than ever before.

Perhaps this mixing means that the US is finally warming to multiracial identity. But if that is indeed happening, it’s not because of demographics, but because of the tireless efforts of activists who continue to fight racism and racial segregation. Movements for racial justice succeed not simply because of demographic shifts but because racial privileges cannot justify themselves in the face of an organised alternative. Many countries have been minority white yet held on to whiteness; to the extent that whiteness meant citizenship, these were states that were ruled by a minority and oversaw the hyper-exploitation of a much larger part of the country. In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa, or Brazil, or Guatemala, where a small light-skinned group has enjoyed privileges at the expense of many more who are excluded.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation. That means acknowledging and challenging the basis of racial categories. It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change. We need to confront the force of racial privilege no matter who inhabits the privileged caste at any given moment. It’s no good imagining that innate human diversity will render the system powerless.

T he US shift towards majority non-whiteness is not destiny, but it is an opportunity. Painter notes that when external conditions change, it becomes possible to imagine different racial hierarchies. The geographical and social remixing of the Second World War cooked down the diverse European identities in the US into a single racial category of ‘white’. Likewise, Asian immigrants occupied one role when Asian immigration was largely working class, West Coast, limited in numbers, and male, as it was at the end of the 19th century. But the racial constraints on Asian Americans shifted when immigration law came to favour professionals, and brought middle- and working-class people, women and men, in larger numbers than before to more US cities.

Using shifting social situations to upend racial hierarchies is not just about challenging racism, but race itself. This doesn’t mean the disingenuous denial of race when racism still very much exists, but a collective challenge to its right to determine our lives. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to take away the police’s prerogative to use violence against African Americans with no legal sanctions; success would undermine an important means of maintaining racial segregation and inequality. What would it mean, once and for all, to bury the shameful, misplaced pride some white people have for the South’s role in the Civil War, and acknowledge instead the irredeemable mistakes of their forefathers? What would it mean to frankly acknowledge each nation’s racial past, and think about what reparations would set us on a path to greater prosperity? Race is neither inevitable nor something we can wish away. Instead, we must take advantage of the instability in what we perceive, and redistribute the power that perpetuates race.

Race never stays still. As the sociologist Richard Alba pointed out in The Washington Post last month, the prediction that the US will be majority non-white by 2044 relies on a definition of race that is static, and doesn’t acknowledge the surprising reality that people’s races change. Nearly 10 million people listed their racial identification differently on the 2010 census than they had in 2000. Alba criticises the census for ‘binary thinking’ which counts anyone with Hispanic heritage as Hispanic, and through a quirk in the census questions, effectively ignores any other racial identity that they could claim. ‘[A] majority-minority society should be seen as a hypothesis, not a foreordained result,’ Alba wrote, of the 2044 claim. This is important, because when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us. Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

This Essay is adapted from Cause … And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018) by Gregory Smithsimon, published by Melville House Books.

Folk music was never green

Don’t be swayed by the sound of environmental protest: these songs were first sung in the voice of the cutter, not the tree

Richard Smyth

Nations and empires

A United States of Europe

A free and unified Europe was first imagined by Italian radicals in the 19th century. Could we yet see their dream made real?

Fernanda Gallo

Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

Consciousness and altered states

How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

The environment

We need to find a way for human societies to prosper while the planet heals. So far we can’t even think clearly about it

Ville Lähde

Archaeology

Why make art in the dark?

New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artists

Izzy Wisher

Life is a journey, not a race

More often than not (at least in my situation), our lives are an addition of things that happen to us or are forced upon us: we don't live, we survive.

If you were to die tomorrow, would you say you lived a good life? I’m putting the emphasis here on the word “live". More often than not (at least in my situation), our lives are an addition of things that happen to us or are forced upon us: we don't live, we survive. We do all of that in the hope that someday we’ll be free of suffering, free of any external influences. But will we?

If there is something I learned in the last few months is the fact that life is a journey, not a race. Trust me, I tried running, I tried not sleeping and doing my best to keep up with people who run faster than me, hopelessly. I trained for the competition as I was supposed to...  only to discover that if I think there is a race, I already lost.

Life is a journey and everyone is on his own path.  There is no comparison possible so, rather than feeling bad for not being as good/fast/smart as the next person, we should think of what we can do to enjoy it better. Think of it as if you were on a cruise. You paid a lot of money and waited a long time to get there but it’s finally D-Day, you’re on the boat! Now, what is better to focus on: how will other people enjoy the view and the buffet, or how you can enjoy them for yourself?

Treat it as an adventure

A few weeks ago, in one of my newsletters, I mentioned how little change in the way we see the world could have a tremendous effect. Sometimes the mere thought of doing something depresses us because we see it as forced by someone else unto us (school, work, parents). Usually, it’s not the actual task that we don’t like but rather the fact that we didn’t have a choice for it.

And, can we change that? Actually, we can, it all depends on the way we choose to see it! Sure, you might want to let it depress you, it’s your right. But you could instead choose to focus on what you can learn and actually have fun with it. Even the most awful situations and subjects have a bright side (even learning maths or doing chores), we just have to find them!

Last updated: 3 years ago

More like that...

2024, a year of exploration

As we finish one more lap around the sun, here is one more opportunity to reflect on our life and the direction we wish to give it going forward.

What content do I want to create?

After a long and unforeseen hiatus, I finally feel ready to address the causes that prevented me to write and feel creative.

Self Improvement Blog

Motivational and inspirational self-improvement blog helping people to unleash their full potential in every area of life ...

Motivational short story about life – Life is a race (Story # 18)

In the series of inspirational and motivational short stories about life, today we are presenting the Motivational Short Story # 18 – “ Life is a race ”. This motivational story communicates a very powerful lesson about life . After reading this; you will know how to run in the race of life. It explains very well that respect can not be demanded, it has to be earned. At the same time; also gives message that we should take along with the weaker and needy people surrounding us.

Motivational short story – Life is a race (Story # 18)

Once upon a time, in a small village lived a young athletic boy. He was a very good runner .

The boy was very hungry for success and for him winning was everything. He measured the success just by winning.

One day, that boy participated in running competition held in village. A large crowd had gathered to witness the sporting spectacle. And, a wise old man, upon hearing of the little boy, had travelled far to bear the witness also. In that competition, he competed with other two little boys. The race commenced, looking like a level heat at the finishing line. The little boy sure enough called on his determination, power and strength , he took the winning line and came first. The crowd was ecstatic and cheered and waved at him. Little boy felt proud and important. The wise man, however, remained still and calm , expressing no sentiment.

Later, a second race was called and in this race two new young and fit challengers came forward and run in competition with little boy. The race was started, and sure enough the little boy came through and finished first once again. Crowd was ecstatic again and cheered and waved at the little boy. The wise man remained still and calm , again expressing no sentiment. The little boy, however, again felt proud and more important. He started to plead, “Another race…!! Another race…!!”

Seeing this, the wise old man stepped forward and presented the little boy with two new challengers. Among new challengers one was an elderly frail old lady and other was a blind man.

You may also like to read :

Motivational and inspirational short stories about life – The Fisherman (Story # 15)

“What’s this??”, quizzed the little boy. “This is no race…!!”, he exclaimed.

Old wise man replied, “Race…!!”

After all were set on starting line. Race started and boy was only one to finish that race, leaving two challengers standing at the starting line.

The little boy was ecstatic and raised his arms in delight. But to his surprise this time no one from crowd was cheering. Everyone was just looking at him silently, showing no sentiment.

“What has happened?? Why not do the people join in my success ??,” little boy asked wise old man.

Wise old man replied, “Race again!! But, this time finish together, all three of you… must finish together”

Little boy thought for a while and then again went to starting line and stood in middle of frail old lady and the blind man. Then he took both the challengers by the hand. The race began and the little boy started to walk slowly, ever so slowly, to the finishing line and crossed it.

This time at end of race crowd was delighted. They smiled , cheered and waved at the little boy.

The wise old man smiled, gently nodding his head.

Little boy felt proud but still didn’t understand why crowd was not cheering him before, but now cheering when all three of them finished race together. He asked old man about it, “Old man, I understand not! Who are the crowd cheering for? Which one of us three?”

The wise old man looked into the little boy’s eyes, placing his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He replied softly, “Little boy, in this race you have won much more than in any race you have ever run before…!! You have won people’s respect. And, for this race crowd cheer not for any winner. They cheer to show the respect how you ran.”

Moral of the Motivational Story

You see in life… your life. What are you running for? Are you hungry for success? Is winning the only measurement of success for you in your life? Who are you running against?

If you always win against everybody. Then, soon the people will stop cheering for you. At the end of your life, if you look back… the question is: Who was running next to you, in the race? If they were weaker and old, did you help them to get across the line? Did you all finish together? Because that is the best race you can ever run… So, run! Run this race called life! But don’t forget: It is not important if you win, it is important how you run this race…

So that’s all from my side in this post. Over to you now, I and other readers will love to hear your thoughts  and learning from this motivating story.

  If you have liked this story, please share with your friends and relatives at your favorite social media networks.

Similar Posts

Inspirational Stories with moral – The Value of Money (Inspiring Story # 25)

Inspiration can come from all sorts of sources. Inspiring stories with moral are one of those inspirational sources. By reading motivational and inspirational stories, people become more energetic and cheerful….

Inspirational Stories – Everything Happens for Good (Story # 9)

Inspirational stories have the ability to inspire, motivate, encourage, make us smile, and teach us success hacks and life lessons . Here is the Inspirational Story # 9 – “Everything…

Inspirational and Motivational short story about life – You are made to Fly High (Story # 6)

Motivational Short stories are always powerful and thought provoking readings. I have already shared with you few wonderful stories filled with inspiration and motivation. In the series of Inspirational and…

Five More Minutes – Inspirational stories about life (Story #12)

Today we are presenting a heart touching story of a father and his beautiful daughter. Our collection of inspiring stories would not have done justice, if we do not add…

Motivational and inspirational short stories about life – The Starfish Story (Story # 4)

On the request of our readers,we have started posting inspiring stories on this blog. In the series of motivational and inspirational short Stories, let me present you the Motivational and…

Motivational and inspirational Stories – Two Shoe Salesmen (Short Story # 24)

In life, everyone needs some motivation and inspiration. Whether you are a student. a working professional; or a startup founder; every one need some source of motivation and inspiration. We…

I like the moral lesson of the story. Thank you for realizing us that in life you must be respectful and learn how to handle a situation. Not to the point that we are competing others.

In life we are so much carried way by material success we forget real Peace and love is ture success . What you will do with money that doesn’t give you peace and that attracts only selfish people …. Look in life good people is important and with love and peace you will find you success….. What a story. Author really put his heart ❤

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh what a great life touching story . respect ……

Really a very nice story!!

Thank you very much

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine

By Julia Angwin

Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist.

It’s a little hard to believe that just over a year ago, a group of leading researchers asked for a six-month pause in the development of larger systems of artificial intelligence, fearing that the systems would become too powerful. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” they asked.

There was no pause. But now, a year later, the question isn’t really whether A.I. is too smart and will take over the world. It’s whether A.I. is too stupid and unreliable to be useful. Consider this week’s announcement from OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who promised he would unveil “new stuff” that “ feels like magic to me.” But it was just a rather routine update that makes ChatGPT cheaper and faster .

It feels like another sign that A.I. is not even close to living up to its hype. In my eyes, it’s looking less like an all-powerful being and more like a bad intern whose work is so unreliable that it’s often easier to do the task yourself. That realization has real implications for the way we, our employers and our government should deal with Silicon Valley’s latest dazzling new, new thing. Acknowledging A.I.’s flaws could help us invest our resources more efficiently and also allow us to turn our attention toward more realistic solutions.

Others voice similar concerns. “I find my feelings about A.I. are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: They do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial,” wrote Molly White, a cryptocurrency researcher and critic , in her newsletter last month.

Let’s look at the research.

In the past 10 years, A.I. has conquered many tasks that were previously unimaginable, such as successfully identifying images, writing complete coherent sentences and transcribing audio. A.I. enabled a singer who had lost his voice to release a new song using A.I. trained with clips from his old songs.

But some of A.I.’s greatest accomplishments seem inflated. Some of you may remember that the A.I. model ChatGPT-4 aced the uniform bar exam a year ago. Turns out that it scored in the 48th percentile, not the 90th, as claimed by OpenAI , according to a re-examination by the M.I.T. researcher Eric Martínez . Or what about Google’s claim that it used A.I. to discover more than two million new chemical compounds ? A re-examination by experimental materials chemists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found “ scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility and utility .”

Meanwhile, researchers in many fields have found that A.I. often struggles to answer even simple questions, whether about the law , medicine or voter information . Researchers have even found that A.I. does not always improve the quality of computer programming , the task it is supposed to excel at.

I don’t think we’re in cryptocurrency territory, where the hype turned out to be a cover story for a number of illegal schemes that landed a few big names in prison . But it’s also pretty clear that we’re a long way from Mr. Altman’s promise that A.I. will become “ the most powerful technology humanity has yet invented .”

Take Devin, a recently released “ A.I. software engineer ” that was breathlessly touted by the tech press. A flesh-and-bones software developer named Carl Brown decided to take on Devin . A task that took the generative A.I.-powered agent over six hours took Mr. Brown just 36 minutes. Devin also executed poorly, running a slower, outdated programming language through a complicated process. “Right now the state of the art of generative A.I. is it just does a bad, complicated, convoluted job that just makes more work for everyone else,” Mr. Brown concluded in his YouTube video .

Cognition, Devin’s maker, responded by acknowledging that Devin did not complete the output requested and added that it was eager for more feedback so it can keep improving its product. Of course, A.I. companies are always promising that an actually useful version of their technology is just around the corner. “ GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a lot ,” Mr. Altman said recently while talking up GPT-5 at a recent event at Stanford University.

The reality is that A.I. models can often prepare a decent first draft. But I find that when I use A.I., I have to spend almost as much time correcting and revising its output as it would have taken me to do the work myself.

And consider for a moment the possibility that perhaps A.I. isn’t going to get that much better anytime soon. After all, the A.I. companies are running out of new data on which to train their models, and they are running out of energy to fuel their power-hungry A.I. machines . Meanwhile, authors and news organizations (including The New York Times ) are contesting the legality of having their data ingested into the A.I. models without their consent, which could end up forcing quality data to be withdrawn from the models.

Given these constraints, it seems just as likely to me that generative A.I. could end up like the Roomba, the mediocre vacuum robot that does a passable job when you are home alone but not if you are expecting guests.

Companies that can get by with Roomba-quality work will, of course, still try to replace workers. But in workplaces where quality matters — and where workforces such as screenwriters and nurses are unionized — A.I. may not make significant inroads.

And if the A.I. models are relegated to producing mediocre work, they may have to compete on price rather than quality, which is never good for profit margins. In that scenario, skeptics such as Jeremy Grantham, an investor known for correctly predicting market crashes, could be right that the A.I. investment bubble is very likely to deflate soon .

The biggest question raised by a future populated by unexceptional A.I., however, is existential. Should we as a society be investing tens of billions of dollars, our precious electricity that could be used toward moving away from fossil fuels, and a generation of the brightest math and science minds on incremental improvements in mediocre email writing?

We can’t abandon work on improving A.I. The technology, however middling, is here to stay, and people are going to use it. But we should reckon with the possibility that we are investing in an ideal future that may not materialize.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Julia Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer and the founder of Proof News , writes about tech policy. You can follow her on Twitter or Mastodon or her personal newsletter .

Search form

Yale awards nine honorary degrees.

Front row, from left, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Judith Rodin, Peter Salovey, Mahzarin Banaji, and Hortense Spillers.  Second row, from left, László Lovász,  Kehinde Wiley,  Mario Capecchi, and Stephen Breyer. (Photo by Michael Marsland)

During its 323rd graduation ceremony on Monday, Yale conferred honorary degrees on nine individuals who have achieved distinction in their fields.

This year’s honorary degree recipients included the eminent social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji; retired U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer; Nobel Prize-winning molecular geneticist Mario Capecchi; health policy leader Risa Lavizzo-Mourey; mathematician and computer scientist László Lovász; research psychologist and global thought leader Judith Rodin; literary critic Hortense Spillers; and visual artist Kehinde Wiley ’01 M.F.A.

And also receiving an honorary degree was Yale President Peter Salovey, who presided over his final Commencement as Yale’s leader before his planned return to the faculty this summer.

The awarding of honorary degrees, which has been a Yale tradition since 1702, recognizes pioneering achievement or exemplary contribution to the common good.

The honorary degree recipients and their citations follow:

Mahzarin Banaji Social psychologist Doctor of Social Science

“ Groundbreaking scholar whose pioneering work has helped establish the role that unconscious processes play in governing human social action, you have educated us to appreciate how our judgment of others may spring, not from conscious dislike or animosity, but from implicit biases we do not recognize or understand. These ‘mind bugs’ occur outside of our awareness or control and give rise to prejudices based on race, gender, age, and other characteristics. Intrepid investigator whose work has opened minds and hearts by illuminating what leads us to categorize others, we are pleased to admit explicit bias in your favor as we honor a beloved former Yale faculty member with the degree of Doctor of Social Science. ”

Stephen Breyer Jurist, retired associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Doctor of Laws

“ Supreme court justice for over a quarter century, you are known for your pragmatic philosophy, a belief that the judiciary must adapt to changing society and consider real-world consequences for human beings when deciding cases. Your fact and data-driven decisions in matters involving school integration, the rights of criminal suspects, a woman’s prerogative to control her own body, and many more, mark you as someone who shares Justice Holmes’ belief that the important thing is ‘not where we stand, but in what direction we are moving.’ Quintessential enlightenment man, Yale celebrates a justice who reminds us that judges must hew to principle, not politics, as we honor you with the degree of Doctor of Laws. ”

Mario Capecchi Molecular geneticist Doctor of Science

“ Born in Verona to a mother who was taken to Dachau, you lived alone on the streets during the Holocaust from age four, scrounging for food, until, through a set of miraculous circumstances, you were brought to the United States. Without any formal schooling until you were nine, you rose to share the Nobel Prize in medicine for the development of gene targeting in mouse embryo stem cells, a discovery that has led to major advancements in human disease, drug development, and more. Inspiring scientist, whose life lessons teach us all and whose story exemplifies the triumph of the human spirit, we award you the degree of Doctor of Science. ”

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey Health policy leader Doctor of Medical Sciences

“ Trailblazing physician, geriatrician, and first woman and first African American to be president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, you have devoted your career to empowering communities and corporations to making equitable health care a shared value. Your persuasiveness has prevailed on big corporations to heed your cry of ‘Less sugar! Less sugar!’ and to help create a healthier America. Yale salutes a visionary who is insistent that all Americans — from every zip code in our nation — can live longer, healthier, better lives, as, with a big glass of delicious water, we toast and award you the degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences. ”

László Lovász Mathematician and computer scientist Doctor of Engineering and Technology

“ Brilliant mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, your pathbreaking contributions in combinatorics, a branch of pure mathematics, have led to real-life applications in computer science, engineering and technology, statistics, and science that serve and advance humankind.  Over time you have received nearly every award a mathematician can earn, including the Abel Prize, the highest award in mathematics. We are honored that you have agreed to receive one more, from the university where you taught and conducted research for over a half decade, and which itself is honored to present you with the degree of Doctor of Engineering and Technology. ”

Judith Rodin Global thought leader Doctor of Humane Letters

“ Pioneering leader who served as the first woman president of both the University of Pennsylvania and the Rockefeller Foundation, you have helped reshape two great institutions to face the needs of modern times. In both, your creative and forward-looking ideas — from health psychology to resilient cities — galvanized initiatives that emphasized change amidst challenge. Yale celebrates as well your twenty-two years in New Haven as a Yale faculty member, educator, dean of the graduate school, and university provost. A resilient and transformational leader wherever you go, Yale salutes an innovator we still think of as ‘one of our own,’ as we proudly confer on you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. ”

Peter Salovey P resident of Yale University Doctor of Humane Letters

“ When you step down in June as Yale’s 23rd president, you will enter history as the Yale professor who has held more senior leadership positions at the university than anyone in its 322-year history. Beginning with your presidency of the  Graduate and Professional Student Senate  when you were a Ph.D. student, you have been, serially, chair of the Psychology Department, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, dean of Yale College, provost, and president — a cornucopia of senior positions held by no other Yale historical personage, ever.

“ When you were appointed, you said you hoped to help a great university create a more accessible, a more innovative, and a more excellent Yale. You have done all three. Yale now has a dramatically wider array of socioeconomic and geographic diversity across its student body, departments, and schools. New buildings have brought together scattered faculty who now work with and learn from each other. New Haven’s economy is strengthened because of your partnership with its mayor. And the new faculty and academic collaborations in schools and programs that you have prioritized have made Yale more innovative and forward looking in developing ways to address society’s greatest challenges.

“ From the start of your presidency your stated aim has been inspiring Yale as a community where students, staff, and faculty collaborate with one another to make a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. As you return now to the faculty after a suitable rest, no doubt to galvanize students as the excellent teacher you always have been, Yale offers its thanks, as we gratefully confer on you your fourth Yale degree, doctor of Humane Letters. ”

Hortense Spillers Literary critic Doctor of Humanities

“ Inspiring Black feminist theorist and critic, your foundational work, embedded in your deep historical and literary knowledge, challenges received thought and provides us a profound understanding of how race and gender shape the modern world. In three books and dozens of essays, you rewrite the American grammar book, claiming the insurgent ground as you revolutionize how we consider and write about our nation’s history and culture. Pioneering thinker, we celebrate the marvels of your inventiveness, and your enduring contributions to letters, as we proudly confer on you the degree of Doctor of Humanities. ”

Kehinde Wiley ’01 M.F.A. Visual artist Doctor of Fine Arts

“ Internationally renowned painter and sculptor, whose portrait of President Obama hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, your arresting portraits, like all pioneering art, break the category, depicting ‘common’ people in traditional styles that raise questions about privilege, power, authority, and representation. Artist recognized around the world for your vibrant and imaginative work, and an awardee of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal for ‘contributions to African and African American culture, and advocacy for intercultural understanding and human rights,’ Yale honors you with a second Yale degree, Doctor of Fine Arts. ”

• Commencement 2024: A celebration of community
• Yale College 2024: Meet some of the graduates
• ‘Until we meet again’ — Baccalaureate and Class Day at Yale

Campus & Community

Peter Raymond appointed Oastler Professor of Biogeochemistry

YSPH graduates urged to adopt a ‘healthy disregard for the impossible’

SEC chair on the future of systemic risk in financial markets

Brodhead to serve as Yale Center for British Art’s interim director

• Show More Articles