Margot Lee Shetterly, Remarks as Delivered
Live at Radio City Music Hall
To President Beilock, members of the Board of Trustees, Distinguished Faculty, proud parents and family, and most of all, to the Barnard College graduating class of 2022: You made it! And you did it during a deadly and devastating global pandemic. When the rough seas of life after college inevitably crash on your shores, know that you were the equal of this first challenge.
I’m humbled that you’ve chosen me to address you at this year’s Commencement and to participate in the Barnard Year of Science. To my fellow recipients of the Barnard Medal of Distinction — Allyson Felix, Stacey Gabriel, Sarah Ruhl, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith — congratulations, it’s an honor for me to be in such distinguished company.
And I’m delighted to be able to say that I share this honor with Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whom I wrote about in my book Hidden Figures. Mrs. Johnson was 100 years old when President Beilock bestowed her with the medal in 2018. She was born during the Spanish Flu, and she died in February 2020, as the COVID pandemic was rising. The odds she faced coming into the world were grim: 32.5 years was the at-birth life expectancy for a Black baby girl born in the United States in 1918. Passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, was still two years away. She attended segregated schools in her native West Virginia; then, in 1938, she was handpicked by the governor of the state to integrate the state’s graduate schools — 16 years before the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down legalized racial segregation in America’s public schools. In the 1960s, when most companies wouldn’t trust a woman with a credit card without the signature of her husband or her father, NASA entrusted Katherine Johnson with the trajectory equations for astronaut John Glenn’s pioneering orbital spaceflight in February 1962.
Katherine Johnson wasn’t just a brilliant mathematician; in math, as well in life, she was fearless, relentlessly curious, open-minded, and because of that she didn’t just count, she was determined to make herself count, from the moment she walked into her job at NASA. When she co-wrote the research report that laid out the orbital mechanics for Glenn’s mission, she wrote her name on that report — she was the first woman in her group to get signed credit for her own work. Doing that, she wrote herself into the story of science, and into American history.
And that is your job when you leave here today: writing yourself into the story.
I remember what it felt like to be in your place, more than 30 years ago now, contemplating what my story was going to be. Science had been my present: It was all around me in the form of my father, who worked as an atmospheric research scientist at NASA, and his colleagues, who included the women I wrote about in my book. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary way to grow up, but at the time I took it for granted.
The past, I wanted nothing to do with. I could never square my own ambitions with the fact that my forebears had been considered legally, socially, and economically less than full citizens — less than fully human — simply because of the color of their skin. What I wanted was something that was different from my present, and as far away as I could get from my past. So, it’s no surprise that I chose a career that seemed like the opposite of history: investment banking! I was still in elementary school when I told my parents that I wanted to move to New York and “work on the stock market.” As you can imagine, they didn’t know whether they should be proud of their daughter or conduct an exorcism. I graduated from the University of Virginia and went to work on Wall Street, wearing a navy blue suit, feeling every bit the Master of the Universe, to use that faded ’80s phrase.
It wasn’t until I began writing Hidden Figures that I understood how much power there was in embracing history, and in being able to write history, especially in a country like the United States. This is a country founded by writers. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin — their prose, and their lucid ideas about the nature of humanity and freedom, is some of the most admired and influential writing in the history of the world. America is essentially a work of the imagination, so it’s no surprise that those of us who are born here, and those of us who come here, as many of you have, devote so much of our lives to pursuing an American dream, and telling an American story.
For those of us whose family history began with a Bill of Sale rather than the Bill of Rights, what we’ve always understood is that the only way to make the American story true for all its citizens is to make it complete. French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville is credited with describing America as an experiment. As a writer, I like to think of it as a draft: The work of moving closer to a “more perfect union” will never end, but the ideal requires us to revise nonetheless. Since the beginning, we’ve been updating our Constitution, and rewriting and reinventing ourselves and our history, in order to correct for what historian Darlene Clark Hine calls “absences and silences.”
After emancipating himself from slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass became an abolitionist, a speaker, a savvy political operator, a newspaper publisher, and the author of three autobiographies. His pen helped write my ancestors into the story, as they moved from bondage, to freedom, to citizenship. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony’s successful campaign for the 19th Amendment provided a new draft, giving women the vote, but Black women like journalist Ida B. Wells and educator Mary Church Terrell and so many other activists still had to fight to bring the concerns of women who weren’t white to center stage.
Now here you are, waiting to add your chapters to the epic, the way your fellow alumna Zora Neale Hurston did in 1928, when, after earning an associate’s degree at Howard University, she enrolled here, and became this school’s first Black graduate. Hurston is one of our country’s great authors, and her novels’ rural Black characters are every bit as American as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Her time here at Barnard wasn’t easy, but it was critical in pushing her to find her voice, and her life’s work: “Beside the waters of the Hudson, I feel my race,” she wrote. “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark spot surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.”
What I know is that each and every one of you here — regardless of your race, your background, your origin — knows that feeling, that over the last four years, you, too, have been overswept by one kind of sea or another. Yet you’ve managed to reveal yourselves here today. Hurston’s words remind me not just of Katherine Johnson and NASA’s Black female mathematicians, but of the thousands of women, of all backgrounds, who did the exacting, often thankless, but critical computations that led to advances in aeronautics, astronomy, chemistry, telephony, electronics, computer science, ballistics, and many other fields, in government, in universities, and in private industry. Women sitting in rooms doing math is one of the great untold stories of the 20th century, and until recently, history looked right past them. But being overlooked by history never meant these women were oblivious to their own ambitions, or to their own roles as protagonists in their own lives. Like you, like Zora Neale Hurston, they earned outstanding educations at women’s colleges, or at historically Black colleges and universities. They took themselves very seriously as mathematicians and women of science, and they had a strong sense of themselves as professionals doing meaningful work. They wrote themselves into the American story. And by writing their history, I was finally able to write my own.
Lest you think that your happily ever after begins the moment you walk out of here with your degree: Stop for a moment and consider the stories that you love best, the ones that you turn to when you’re trying to make sense of the world, the ones you read under the covers with a flashlight when you’re down and out and have nowhere else to turn. They’re not the ones that have a simple beginning, middle, and end. We choose these stories not because they are easy, but because they’re hard. They’re the ones in which every heroine, every hero, is also flawed, and every villain is also vulnerable. They’re the tales in which no path is straight, and no choice is obvious. The stories that stay with us long after we read the last sentence on the final page are the ones in which the protagonists are beset by failures, betrayals, dead ends, and worst of all, self-doubt. There is no story without conflict, just as there is no history without conflict, no society without conflict, no family without conflict, no individual without conflict.
But the most meaningful stories offer something that keeps us turning the page: the promise of a mystery revealed when the crisis passes and the waters ebb, or the possibility that in the grief and sorrow of our human condition, we are not alone. Those powerful stories give us an optimism — it's not the simple optimism of facile ideals, but the optimism of the courageous, which is nuanced, complex, and often contradictory. In the best stories, that creates a sense of urgency that keeps us reading to the end. In real life, the same force motivates us to get up each morning, even if nearly broken by the long night before. It compels us to act even when those around us, including those close to us, tell us that all is lost.
Sometimes I reread my book with a critical eye, and I think to myself, I wished I’d explained this more carefully, or used a different turn of phrase here, or eliminated this altogether. But it’s mine and it’s complete; if you get up and write just a little bit every day, eventually you will have a book. All books, all stories, are imperfect. But it’s the untold story that’s the tragedy. “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you,” Zora Neale Hurston said.
Barnard College Class of 2022, you have made your mark on this institution. The time has come for you to write yourself into the future: of science, of mathematics, of history, of the arts, of statecraft, of whatever it is that is inside of you, and moves you, and will not be suppressed. Never allow the absences and silences to hold you back. Fill them in. You, and you alone, are the author of your own life, and your own story. Now sit down and start working on that next chapter.
Congratulations, and thank you for inviting me here today.