On Sunday May 8, Barack Obama delivered a speech to graduates of Howard University in Washington, DC, a historically black university based just a few miles from the White House. Obama used the opportunity to remind the crowd how much the world has changed–not just since his term as US president, but through the 1980s, when he was a college student, and the 1960s, when the equal rights and social justice movements were born in the modern era.

If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be–what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into–you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now. If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, “young, gifted, and black” in America, you would choose right now.

Obama also urged graduates to keep bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice, noting that, “we’ve got a justice gap when too many black boys and girls pass through a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails. This is one area where things have gotten worse. When I was in college, about half a million people in America were behind bars. Today, there are about 2.2 million. Black men are about six times likelier to be in prison right now than white men.”

Obama asked graduates to “be confident in your blackness.” He mentioned his recent visit with rapper Kendrick Lamar and his dinner with Queen Elizabeth in noting “there’s no one way to be black.”

Image: President Barack Obama speaks during the commencement ceremony for Howard University in Washington, DC on May 7, 2016. SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES