BROOKLYN — He's the 109th Mayor of New York City, but on Friday at Barclays Center, Bill de Blasio was just another dad at his son's high school graduation.
The mayor, his wife, Chirlane McCray, and their daughter, Chiara, waved and yelled to get Dante de Blasio's attention at his graduation from Brooklyn Technical High School.
Bill de Blasio was the keynote speaker and used his speech to tease his youngest child before turning serious and encouraging the 1,300 graduates to go out into the world with the mission of making a difference.
"Do not stand idly by, because your talents are so great and change is needed so badly," de Blasio told graduates.
The mayor said Dante had warm feelings about his alma mater, saying he felt as if he had a community. De Blasio joked about how trips to school with his son Dante changed from "nice chats" after his son joined the debate team.
"You can guess who won most of the time," said de Blasio. "The guy who will be crossing this stage in his flip flops, that's who."
But de Blasio also addressed serious issues. He talked of his own feelings of not having a sense of how he could make a difference in the world when he was a young man. Although he described himself as optimistic, de Blasio said that always wasn't the case.
"When I was at the exact same point you were at I didn't feel that way at all," said the mayor.
De Blasio says he found his calling in the 1980s during protests about United States involvement in Central America.
Today, the graduates have their own challenges. The mayor referenced the recent shooting deaths of nine African-Americans at a Charleston, S.C., church that is being investigated as a hate crime.
He also talked about the "tragic violence" black men and women have faced at the hands of police in the last year and referenced the "Black Lives Matter" protest movement which sprouted in response.
"It would not be unfair for you to feel cynical or frustrated by some of these realities," said the mayor. "You can be agents of something better."
"Use those gifts to correct that injustice, that inequality," he added.
Dante will attend Yale University.
De Blasio's father was also a graduate of Yale. The mayor said in April that his son was "a very deliberate guy and he did a lot of research" in choosing Yale because he was excited by the "academic life" there.
The mayor's son first broke into the public spotlight when he and his large afro appeared in a campaign advertisement during the 2013 mayoral race.
Dante made the news again when de Blasio said that he and McCray had trained Dante on how to interact with police to avoid trouble following the decision of a grand jury not to indict a police officer in the death of black Staten Island man Eric Garner.
On Friday, Dante was back in the spotlight again. As the mayor teased his son, Dante, who displayed his famous afro sans graduation cap, received sympathy from some in the crowd.
"That poor boy," said one Barclays usher as the mayor joked about his son.
