Juneteenth – Our collective history, our current roles, our communities' future

Juneteenth had not been taught in my primary or secondary school. For years, I believed, like many, that the nationwide dismantling of slavery took place soon after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863. In reality, slaves in parts of the country were kept ignorant about their legal status as free people, and so these communities continued on as though nothing had changed. On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union Soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to let the residents know that slavery had been abolished. 

As a Black woman who has worked at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business as a Diversity & Inclusion professional for the last two years, it is humbling to admit that I didn’t grasp the profound importance of this date before the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others. But allowing pride to get in the way of acknowledging the entire truth is detrimental to growth. Before we can truly move forward, we need to acknowledge and understand our history, both individually and as institutions of which we are a part.

A little about my history - my mom grew up and worked on a sharecropper’s farm in Batesburg, SC along with her 13 brothers and sisters. She attended a segregated school until entering high school. My dad grew up in Long Island, NY, the middle child of three. He was poor in his early years, but part of a growing number of Black middle-class communities in the north when he was older. They both taught me that hard work and determination combined with education were the keys to success. 

While they also taught me to be proud of who I was, I never truly felt comfortable in my Blackness until later on in my adulthood. My experiences as a Duke undergrad, traveling around the world, and living in major cities like Berlin, Germany, Washington, DC and New York City, gave me the knowledge, experience and confidence I needed to begin to proudly embrace being a Black woman. 

Yet still, it wouldn’t be until the spring of 2020 that I began to delve deeper into what the intersection of my present and my past looked like, and how it defined who I was and what it really means to be Black in this country. I finally had the proper language to talk about race, racism and anti-Black discrimination in America and discuss the biases and microaggressions I personally had experienced throughout my life as a Black person.

At the same time, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business began an introspective dive into what we had done, what we were doing and what we needed to do to create a more fair, unbiased and equitable institution. From openly committing to dismantling racism to the creation of the Racial Equity Working Group (now known as the Fuqua Anti-Racism Initiative), Fuqua took a hard look at our own history, acknowledging failures and highlighting the good work we had already done. 

After thorough examination and some intense soul searching, our school produced a 51-page report with commitments, recommendations and accountabilities. It seems like a daunting document with ambitious goals, but students, staff and faculty have been hard at work in the last year and beyond to address the inequities, lack of representation and questions around belonging that have existed throughout Fuqua’s history.

While each stakeholder at Fuqua is dedicated to dismantling systemic racism within higher education, we must remember that each person is also on their own journey to learning about their history, their current role and how they can sustain their own momentum to support the long, arduous road to racial equity. 

On this Juneteenth, I ask that we all take time to educate ourselves and contemplate on how we can learn from the past, learning from (in)actions that stymied progress, so as to avoid them in the future. And as we reflect, let’s celebrate Juneteenth and share our achievements and strategies with each other as we continue our work in earnest to create a more diverse, equitable and inclusive world.