Last Friday I attended a graduation at a local liberal arts college, not one of the state-run joints, but a small university with an innovate model that seems a lot like an old vocational approach blended with traditional higher education.

The Keynote Speaker was Byron Pitts, Anchor and Chief National Correspondent for ABC. Byron wrote a book titled Step Out on Nothing, about his struggles as a poor boy from East Baltimore from a single-parent household diagnosed with a severe learning disability, and recommended for ‘institutional’ care.

As Byron grew up in the same locale and under the same conditions as many of the subjects of my Harm City oral history project, and now works as a high profile member of one of the five corporate mouthpieces that prop up the very government that has engineered the misery he described, I was wondering how far he would go, how far he had come.

Byron did not say anything to jeopardize his position. But, apparently comfortable on a small stage, he did not advocate laws, social engineering, or political solutions. He came back again and again to the importance of family, individual mentoring, and cultivating a position as a positive influence in such institutions as churches and colleges.

If you take away the call to bring down the sitting political hierarchy, Mister Pitt’s speech could have been the speech of any Libertarian or white radical. He made no call to political action, although a political-minded person could have taken it that way. He did not mention voting once. Byron, who stated for the record that he was ‘a black man’ also went out of his way to point out the racial discrimination that was directed by non-whites against his white Estonian English professor two generations ago.

That is a crack in the racist armor this country is built upon. I never thought I would hear a black public speaker admit that whites might be the victims of racism. Byron Pitts gave an impassioned address, and he did so, it seemed to me, as a man who had seen so much that he was no longer bound to the strict interpretation of American life that the organization he represents serves.

For one, it was a pleasure to hear a professional speaker address an audience outside of a political context. Normally such skilled speakers devote their considerable prowess to obscuring and twisting the truth. Byron rattled off a number of lethal disasters and wars he covered and equated his career as something that resembled a partnership with ‘death’.

The clutch moment in his address was when Byron spoke of his meeting with a girl from East Baltimore, who attended a charter school in which 68% of the students came from ‘no-parent households’! His shock at the term had still not left him. She asked him, “Where do you hide when the world hurts too much?”

He went on to mention her repeated rape in a foster household, spent some time describing what a ‘no-parent household’ was, and noted that 50% of the public school students in “Toledo Ohio, come from ‘no-parent households’!”

Think about that one town, that one number.

Does anything else even need to be said?

A decade or two ago, a man in Byron Pitts’ position would be advocating for political action. The impression I took away from his speech was that these relatively privileged young people were ethically bound to do what they could to help those they could. He did call for them to try and change the world, but betrayed no allegiance whatsoever to his corporate masters. It was a veiled speech to be sure, but it had to be.