By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

CHICAGO – Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco likes to keep it real.

That was evident this week when the local rap star delivered the keynote speech to a group of young black men as part of a “Mass Black Male Graduation and Transition to Manhood ceremony” at Chicago State University, the Chicago Sun Times reports.

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“Congratulations, you have graduated from one of the most terrible, substandard school systems in the entire world. You have just spent the last … 12 years receiving one of the worst educations on earth. You are at least four, five steps behind people in other countries that are younger than you,” Fiasco told the teens, according to the news site.

The ceremony was attended by “elders” in Chicago’s black community, including doctors, lawyers, businessmen and politicians. Fiasco paid each of the 150 graduates that attended $100 each to soak up some words of wisdom from those who spoke at the ceremony, the news site reports.

“Transition to manhood is the most important thing that’s going on right now. The caps and the gowns and your tassels and your honorary blah blah blahs don’t mean nothing. That’s just dress. That’s just some clothes. Meaningless clothes too, because they have no real purpose in life. They don’t keep you warm. What do they do?” Fiasco said in his speech.

“They represent to someone else that you’ve achieved something. But then when you look back at it, what have you achieved?”

Fiasco said he knows first-hand what it takes to rise up from the city’s infamously bad public schools, and explained that students maintaining their manhood is a key element of success because “for young black men … it is one of the last things that we have … and one of the last things that we can control. Manhood is connected to humanity,” he said, according to the Sun Times.

Others speakers, including civil rights attorney Thomas N. Todd, echoed Fiasco’s sentiments.

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“I don’t care how smart your smartphone is, I don’t care how great your technology is, I don’t care what you have – You still cannot download freedom,” Todd said, the news site reports. “You must work to be free. Education has always made the difference for us.”

The message resonated with those who attended the event, including Sharon Hunley, mother of one of the 17-year-old graduates.

“The needed to hear that,” she said.

We certainly agree. There’s no denying the Chicago Public Schools system is a failure of epic proportions, churning out generation after generation of graduates unprepared for the real world.

Many of the problems in the system can be traced directly to political lobbying and contractual obligations imposed on school officials by the Chicago Teachers Union, which ironically claims to fight for minority students and the city’s poor.

Union officials constantly provide excuses about the poor academic performance of Chicago students, blaming parents, school administrators, society, and anything else to deflect attention from the union’s toxic influence.

It’s refreshing to hear local community leaders speak honestly to students to give them a dose of reality that will prepare them for what their schools did not.

“These speakers are telling them, ‘You’re about to enter into a new reality, and that new reality is a world that is traditionally not kind to black men,’” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project.