President Obama spoke in New York Thursday at the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, the nation’s largest civil rights group. In what NAACP President Benjamin Jealous described as Obama’s “most forthright speech” on race since taking office, Obama sounded off on his recurrent theme of personal responsibility.

President Obama: “Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes, because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we’ve internalized a sense of limitation, how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.”