On Juneteenth, Reflecting on Our Collective Equity Journey

[SHELDON BOND]

I think in Frederick Douglass's speech, he's calling us to recognize and understand that unless we're bringing people together, unless we have everybody in the room, we're missing on a lot of relevant information, a lot of relevant data that would help us progress forward, and we can't do that unless we're cognizant of and recognize that everybody's experience isn't the same. We need to integrate all those different experiences and different perspectives into one.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I’m J.B. Wogan from Mathematica and welcome back to On the Evidence. 

We’re releasing this episode on June 19th, which is celebrated by many around the United States as Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in this country. 

Recently, one of the ways staff at Mathematica have honored this important moment in U.S. history is by joining together in person and virtually on June 18th to read aloud and discuss a speech by Frederick Douglass titled, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass gave the speech in front of a predominately white abolitionist audience about 11 years before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring more than three million enslaved people living in the Confederate states to be free. The speech focuses on the contradiction of celebrating liberty at a time when millions remained in slavery. It both celebrates the ideals of the country’s founding, and laments the ways that the country has fallen short of those ideals. 

For this episode, I speak with Sheldon Bond, the deputy director of Mathematica’s labor and employment area, who also acts as a co-lead for the company’s Black Employee Resource Group. Mathematica’s Black and Disability employee resource groups work with the Princeton Library to organize the readings of Frederick Douglass’s speech. Between clips of our interview, I’m also going to play excerpts from last year’s reading, starting with this one, which features Mathematica’s Rachel Miller, Sarah Lieff, and Gloria Jackson-McLean: 

[RACHEL MILLER]

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

[SARAH LIEFF]

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. . . . But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. 

[GLORIA JACKSON-MCLEAN]

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

[J.B. WOGAN]

Sheldon, last year, after the community reading, you noted in closing remarks that the speech was given in a different context, before the Civil War, and on the heels of the Fugitive Slave Act, but that the emotion and tenor of Douglass’s speech still rang true for you in our current times. Talk about that. In what way does the speech still resonate with you? 

[SHELDON BOND]

Throughout the speech, he's pointing out fundamental contradictions between the way we understand collectively our history and the actual facts on the ground of what it took to achieve the independence, to achieve the prosperity that we now embrace. And he wants folks to understand that contradiction. 

And he emphasizes that, you know, “I say this with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I'm not included within the pale, glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”

And I think that line speaks to the intent of the speech to ultimately try to bridge that gap, to build common understanding, and to build some sort of shared experience out of an experience that in and of itself created massive divisions, that took, and that have taken generations really to fully embrace, to fully understand and to sort of cross over. 

Particularly now, when literally we have more distance between us than we did in years past, where we're much more atomized and with hybrid work environments, it's much more difficult for some folks to be able to connect and find that sense of community. I think it challenges our ability to develop that shared understanding, particularly in tragedy, particularly when bad things happen, particularly when we recognize the long legacy of historical injustices that still pattern our day-to-day lives.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So, before I watched a recording from last year’s reading, I had heard about it from multiple staff who expressed how much they were moved by it. And when I went back to watch the reading myself, I noticed that even some of the people who participated in the reading seemed to be reacting emotionally to Douglass’s words and how they relate to injustices that persist through today. Was that your experience, too? What kind of feedback did you hear from people who attended or participated last year? 

[SHELDON BOND]

I got similar reactions from folks and, overall, I think it was a moment for reflection. If you bear in mind, right, we're 4 years away from when George Floyd lost his life due to the hands of police. And so when we did this last, I think we were a little bit closer and those feelings and that experience still, I think, resonates with a lot of folks and recognizing what that does to that collective psyche, right? 

And so, I think what the actual event itself was bringing out in people was an awareness of something that they probably don't talk about on a daily basis. They probably don't encounter or think about, but that resonates in a different way now because of the kinds of efforts people have made to bring these issues to bear and really drive home that the questions around diversity, equity, inclusion are not uniquely suited or tailored to a particular group. It's an everybody question, and it pertains to and affects the progress of everybody. 

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, let’s hear a little more from the speech. These next excerpts are read by Mathematica’s Stacie Feldman, Rachael Jackson, A’lantra Wright, and Kirsten Miller. 

[STACIE FELDMAN]

My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day from the slave’s point of view. Standing, here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

[RACHAEL JACKSON]

What?, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

[A’LANTRA WRIGHT]

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

[KIRSTEN MILLER]

You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So Sheldon, I wanted to ask you about a passage in the speech. Douglass says, “now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work.” I read that as a kind of challenge to the audience. Do you hear it as a challenge and how does it inform the way you do your work? 

[SHELDON BOND]

Yeah, and I think, it challenges me to try to develop a fuller understanding of the lived experience of those who don't have the same or don't travel in the same lane as I do. I think there are still a number of challenges across many dimensions of American social life that exhibit the inequalities that are at the core of our founding, and without being in a position to really change any of that, I think the first step and in the first point that his speech calls us to, is to develop that awareness, to seek out and try to understand the experiences of others and how our system distributes benefits and burden sometimes unequally to others.

[J.B. WOGAN]

A lot of Mathematica’s work is at the intersection of data and public policy, data and programs that affect people’s well-being. Do you see connections between the speech and Mathematica’s work around data, research, and improving public policy? 

[SHELDON BOND]

I think the resonating message is, is to make effective policy decisions and to really get the most out of the data that we gather, we need to have a more participatory frame, and we need to make sure that we have voices in the room that represent different perspectives and recognizing those internal biases in the limitations of our own frame of reference, it becomes really important then to supplement and build on the data that we have by bringing in those additional perspectives and recognizing we need each other to create a complete picture.

The data that we have, more often than not, has gaps. There are places that it just doesn't tell us enough. And in order to fill those gaps, we need folks with different perspectives to see, not just the data, but the people at the core of that data, the people who are living the lives that generated that data and understand and have an insight into their experience.

Because even if, you know, I'm in the room per se, it's not a question of creating a room full of people who look different. It's about incorporating their voice. It's about hearing what they're saying and hearing their perspective. And that oftentimes requires more than just token representation.  It requires a level of engagement. It requires a level of investment in folks. 

And, from a workplace standpoint, we talk a lot about the need to really hear and be collegial and be collaborative. And it's not enough to have a team of diverse people. You have to actually create space for them to actually provide input, provide insight, and be able to influence decisions on your project, be able to influence the design of how you build out your survey, be able to influence the analysis process in substantive ways. 

You know, interestingly enough, one of the books, we have a work-from-home reading group that reads a variety of things from fiction to nonfiction. This month, this quarter's, selection is a book titled Invisible Women, how data fosters and supports gender-based inequality. And, the basic premise is the idea that an average isn't really useful in sort of characterizing general experience because nobody is the average, right? 

So it challenges you to recognize that sex disaggregated data is important and is not oftentimes collected in ways where we can develop useful insights on how, for example, bathrooms should be designed or how design choices around just our day-to-day environment need to account for half the population, and more often than not, we often assume that male is standard. So, we build around sort of the male experience because men are in the room and we don't oftentimes account for all of the other ways in which that those design choices impact women. 

So it's the kind of thing that I think in Frederick Douglass's speech, he's calling us to recognize and understand that unless we're bringing people together, unless we have everybody in the room, we're missing on a lot of relevant information, a lot of relevant data that would help us progress forward, and we can't do that unless we're cognizant of and recognize that everybody's experience isn't the same. We need to integrate all those different experiences and different perspectives into one.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Sheldon, thanks for speaking with me today. 

[SHELDON BOND]

Thank you, J.B. 

[J.B. WOGAN]

We’ll end with the closing lines of Douglass’s speech about the Fourth of July. These clips are read by Mathematica’s Boyd Gilman and Dawnavan Davis. 

[BOYD GILMAN]

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference.

[DAWNAVAN DAVIS]

The time was when such could be done. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other. In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it: 

All God speed the day when human blood 
Shall cease to flow! 
In every clime be understood, 
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good, 
Not blow for blow; 

That day will come all feuds to end, 
And change into a faithful friend 
Each foe.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Thanks to Sheldon Bond for speaking with me ahead of this year’s reading of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” I also want to thank Rachel Miller, Sarah Lieff, Gloria Jackson-McLean, Stacie Feldman, Rachael Jackson, A’lantra Wright, Kirsten Miller, Boyd Gilman, and Dawnavan Davis for giving us permission to use clips from their reading of the speech last year. In the show notes, I include a blog post Sheldon wrote for our My Mathematica series about how, as a natural introvert, he has learned to be more extroverted, to communicate, connect, and build relationships in the context of a growing company with an increasingly hybrid work culture. 

This episode was produced by the inimitable Rick Stoddard. As always, thank you for listening to On the Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. If you liked this episode, please consider leaving us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. To catch future episodes of the show, subscribe at mathematica.org/ontheevidence