Making History in Dark Times: Refuse Numbness. Refuse Silence
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Text of Henry Giroux’s Honorary Degree and Commencement Address at the University of Southern Maine, May 9. 2026.
President Edmundson, distinguished faculty, honored guests, families, and most importantly, graduates.
It is a profound honor to address you on this day of celebration and possibility. This moment is especially meaningful to me because I began my own academic journey here, at what was then Gorham State College. It was here in the 1960s that I first learned that education is not simply about acquiring knowledge, but about learning how to think, question, and imagine the world differently. It was here that I learned that education should be a place where students realize themselves as critical and engaged citizens who can expand and deepen the possibilities of democratic public life. That experience opened the door to a lifetime of writing, teaching, and reflecting on the meaning and promise of education. USM holds a lasting place in my memory and in shaping who I have become.
Today, as we celebrate your achievements, we should also speak candidly about the historical moment into which you now graduate. Yours is a generation coming of age in a time of profound crisis and unsettling uncertainty. Across the globe, we are witnessing intensifying climate catastrophe, the ever-present shadow of nuclear conflict, widening inequalities that hollow out democracy, a culture of relentless immediacy, rising authoritarianism, and renewed assaults on public institutions, especially higher education.
We are also living through an era in which truth is under siege, where the language of justice has been emptied of meaning, where cruelty is too often normalized as a form of governance, and state violence becomes routine. In such a moment, education is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is not simply a pathway to a career, it is a moral and political force, a vital resource for understanding the world and changing it.
Education, at its best, is one of the few spaces left where individuals can learn to think critically, connect private troubles to public issues, revive historical memory, and develop the civic courage necessary to hold power accountable. But such a vision is under attack. Increasingly, education is reduced to training, stripped of its ethical and political dimensions, and aligned with the narrow demands of the market. Even worse, in states such as Florida, Texas, and Idaho, higher education is being transformed into laboratories of indoctrination. In this diminished view, students become consumers, knowledge is reduced to its exchange value, books are banned, history is censored, and the broader mission of education, to cultivate informed, engaged, and compassionate citizens while defending democracy, is pushed to the margins. You must refuse this narrowing of your education and your future, along with this rewriting of America in dangerously authoritarian terms.
One of the most important tasks of education is to enable you to translate private troubles into public issues, to see yourselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of a larger social fabric. In an age marked by isolation, fragmentation, and a culture of relentless individualism, this act of connection is deeply political. It is also deeply human.
You should also learn to make connections between your own experiences and the lives of others, between the local and the global, between history and the present, between knowledge and responsibility. Without such connections, there can be no meaningful solidarity, and without solidarity, there can be no democracy.
It is crucial that you learn to think critically and imaginatively. To think critically is not merely to question facts; it is to understand the forces that shape them, the power relations that organize society, and the ways injustice often hides in plain sight. It is to recognize that the problems you face, whether they involve economic precarity, racial injustice, ecological collapse, or political repression, are not merely individual burdens, but part of larger systemic forces.
Your task is not merely to succeed within the world as it is, but to question it, reimagine it, and fight for a world that is more just, more equal, and more humane. You must learn to see differently in order to act otherwise, to govern rather than be governed. Such a task begins with cultivating a critical consciousness, an ethical sensibility, and the courage to act. The great challenge of your generation is to reinvent the language of politics and make clear that there is no democracy without informed citizens. You should embrace, rather than deny, education’s critical function, joining freedom to social responsibility.
But critique alone is not enough; it must be matched by hope. Hope is not a naïve belief; it is informed courage, a refusal to accept injustice as inevitable. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., hope refuses to normalize racism, poverty, sexism, and militarism, offering the confidence that such problems can be changed. Hope is the conviction that memory matters, that the future is not predetermined, and that collective action can transform the conditions under which we live. Without hope, there is no agency. Without agency, there is no resistance. And without resistance, there is no democracy. Your generation will need such hope more than ever. You inherit a world marked by staggering challenges: a planet in ecological peril, democratic institutions under assault, wars that threaten unimaginable destruction, and an economic system that produces both unprecedented wealth and devastating inequality. But you also inherit something else: the capacity to act.
Hope becomes meaningful only when it enters the world through action, and action is one of the ways we make history. History is not something that simply happens to you; it is something you help to make. And while the forces aligned against justice may seem overwhelming, history is filled with examples of individuals and movements that refused to accept the given, that dared to think otherwise, and in doing so, transformed the world.
The civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid, the fight for workers’ rights, and the movements for gender and environmental justice remind us that change is possible, but never easy. It requires courage, persistence, and a willingness to challenge entrenched power. History offers you the power not only to learn from the past, but also to struggle for justice with others; how to make history rather than be swept away by it, and how to govern wisely rather than merely submit to those who would govern maliciously.
The great crises of our time are not only political or economic; they are also cultural and linguistic. The vocabulary of justice, equality, and compassion has been eroded, replaced by the language of self-interest, competition, and disposability. When language is impoverished, thought diminishes, and with it, democracy itself. You should reclaim and revive a language that speaks to the common good, that affirms the dignity of all people, that insists on the importance of care, compassion, and mutual responsibility.
The words we use shape the world we inhabit. To speak of justice is to imagine its possibility. To speak of compassion is to make it visible. To speak of democracy is to keep it alive. Do not be seduced by a society that measures success only in terms of wealth, status, and power. Such measures are empty if they are not connected to a broader sense of purpose and responsibility. Instead, think of your life as a project rooted in the desire to make the world more just, more equal, and more humane.
Expand your sense of what is possible. Refuse to be governed by fear. Stand in solidarity with others. Defend the institutions that keep democracy alive.
If there is one final charge I want to leave with you, it is this: I would urge you to expand your dreams and embrace acts of solidarity, work to enlarge the common good, and collectivize compassion. These are the practices that will enable your generation not merely to be governed, but to govern wisely and justly.
Remember, democracy is never simply handed to us; it has always been forged through collective struggle and sustained by the courage of those willing to resist. At its best, it demands that you ask what your responsibility is in the face of an unlivable and often unspeakable future. Refuse numbness. Refuse silence. Refuse the comfort of looking away.
Act with courage in the face of injustice. Make the unimaginable possible and expand the space of the possible beyond the limits of the present. To hold onto such a vision in dark times, we need guides, voices that remind us what it means to refuse despair. Let me leave you with two such voices, Ernst Bloch and James Baldwin, who have long guided those who refuse to surrender in dark times.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch reminds us that hope is never fully extinguished. It may be wounded, pushed aside, burdened by disappointment, but it endures, because the world itself is unfinished, history remains open, and the future is still waiting for those willing to act. And that responsibility now belongs to you. But hope without courage is empty. It must be spoken, enacted, and defended.
That is why I turn to James Baldwin, who warned that when the lights begin to go out, when fear and injustice threaten to overtake the world, it becomes the task of each generation to illuminate the darkness, to blaze roads through it, and to refuse the lie that the present is all that is possible. He writes:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
As the lights flicker and the shadows lengthen, in a time marked by the rise of fascism across the globe, staggering inequality, and the collapse of moral conscience, remember that hope, though wounded, is not dead, and that history, however threatened, remains within your reach. Darkness is real, but it is not destiny. It calls upon your courage to confront it, your clarity to name it, your strength to challenge it, and your resolve to refuse it. Go forward with conviction and with a deep sense of responsibility to others. Reject indifference. Stand in solidarity. Expand the space of the possible. And above all, do not simply succeed in the world as it is, but help transform it into the world as it should be, because what lies ahead, in all its promise and peril, now rests in your hands.
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