John Legend: Leading With Love to Build Healthier and Safer Communities – Duke Today

President Price, Provost Kornbluth, deans, and faculty: Thank you for inviting meand including me in this venerable class.

To all the Duke community alumni, friends, faculty, family, whether youre tuning in from Durham or across the world: Welcome!

And most importantly thankfully, blissfully let me extend a big, in-the-flesh congratulations to our guests of honor: The Class of 2021!

What a day! What a year! What an accomplishment! Congratulations!

D-D-M-F!

You know, this is the first time Ive been in front of a live audience, hearing live applause, since last February. 14 months ago. For a needy performer, this is a very big deal. It feels nice.

But this is not my first time on your beautiful campus. Way back in 2004, I performed at LDOC with someone named Kanye West. (Anyone heard of him?)

In those days, I would play piano and sing the hooks for Kanye, and hope people would notice me.

Then later that year, we released my first album, Get Liftedand Im realizing today that maybe its thanks to Duke that my career took off.

And Im thrilled its brought me full circle, back to speak with you on this most momentous day.

Seriously, this is a special milestone. And if you dont feel it yet well, thats okay, too. When I was prepping for my own graduation way back in 1999, I remember feeling pretty indifferent.

Back then, I was too cool to care about a silly ceremony. Id already done the work. Id made the friends. Id turned in my papers and passed the tests.

What was the point of all the pomp and circumstance?

But, during the actual ceremony, I realized: Being together is the point. Being joyous is the point. Celebrating is the point.

We have so few moments to enjoy these rites of passage to just revel in our accomplishments with the people we love.

Today is one of those moments. And, of course, after a year when we couldnt gather at all, it takes on a special meaning.

Lets just acknowledge the elephant in the stadium: On your way to Wallace Wade, your class lost a lot.

Some lost job offers. Some lost loved ones. And all of you lost a whole year of those little moments that make college so special the in-between moments.

Those late nights in Perkins, sitting across the table from your delirious friends.

Those talks in the common room or spontaneous lunch dates. Those weeks camping out in the freezing cold for tickets to a sports game, because apparently thats a thing we do here.

Those nights dancing around burning benches after you win a sports game because, apparently, thats a thing we also do here?

All this loss is no joke.

I keep thinking about your senior performances. Losing those would have been tragic for me. All you band members and a capella singers and dancers and improv aficionados, I feel your pain.

Youve lost something you cant get back. I wont sugarcoat that. It sucks.

But from what youve lost from all of this vast, incalculable loss youve gained something, too.

The fact that youre here today, graduates of one of the worlds best universities, means that youve had to approach life with a certain competitiveness.

I know because I did it, too.

I skipped grades to get ahead. Worked hard to graduate second in my high school class. Went to Penn. Got a job at Boston Consulting Group.

That path required this constant drive to push harder, reach higher, do better to try to be perfect, or close to it. Im sure it sounds familiar.

But over the past year, you were forced to pause... to see yourselves not in competition with one another, but in community with each other. Anyone getting sick was a risk to everyone.

We all had to slow down. Social distance. Cover our faces. Stop filling our days with maximum productivity, and simply keep each other safe. Keep each other alive. Care for one another.

And this perspective you gained will serve us all. Because while that competitive drive that got you here can be an incredible gift, it can get in the way too.

We all know that for Duke to win, UNC must... I think we say G-T-H?

But that competitiveness can be a slippery slope to thinking: For me to get ahead in life, for me to succeed, someone else is going to have to lose out. Someone else is going to have to suffer.

You let that competitiveness take over your thinking, and you might start seeing life as a zero-sum game.

This kind of thinking has poisoned our democracy from the beginning.

One of the most important books I read this year was The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee. In it, McGhee lays out exactly how much that zero-sum game has cost us.

Americas story has always been marred by efforts to exclude, to dominate, to subjugate to keep certain groups of people with no voice, no power, and no opportunity. Workers. Women. Indigenous people. Black people. Immigrants. The LGBTQ community

All because of a fear that if those people did better, people at the top would lose out.

The miracle of our story is that, as we expanded opportunity, in our best moments, we proved that those fears were unfounded.

When more people made more money, rich business owners didnt suffer. They got more customers! Prosperity increased for everyone.

When people whod been excluded finally got their voices heard, it didnt mean everyone else had to sit down and shut up. Our national conversations got better, truer, smarter and so did our public policies.

Our nation is at its best when we realize that we all do better when we all do better.

Yet, today, were still fighting against the old zero-sum thinking thats been holding us back since the beginning.

We see it in efforts to deny people their right to vote. We see it in the shameful attacks on trans rights.

Our nation is at its best when we realize that we all do better when we all do better. Yet, today, were still fighting against the old zero-sum thinking thats been holding us back since the beginning.

We see it around the world. In places like China, Hungary, Russia, India, Myanmar across the globe, nativism, sectarianism, exploitation, and authoritarianism are gaining ground.

We see it in efforts to hoard economic opportunity, too. Today, the 26 wealthiest people on the planet own as much as the 3.5 billion poorest.

And powerful people are spending lots of money lobbying to keep it that way.

And, of course, we see it in our policing and carceral systems: In the simple fact that so many people heard Black Lives Matter and assumed it meant that other lives couldnt matter, too. Thats zero-sum thinking if Ive ever seen it.

Now, I know some of you may be thinking: Why is he bringing us down on our graduation day?

And you wouldnt be the first to say something like that.

As North Carolina native Nina Simone once said, It is an artists duty to reflect the times in which we live. And you know what I think? It is also a bankers duty. Its a lawyers duty, a doctors duty, a teachers duty, an engineers duty, an entrepreneurs duty, a plumbers duty, a nurses duty. A moms and dads duty.

Ive been hearing calls to shut up and sing for my entire career. (Shut up and sing)

Well, as North Carolina native Nina Simone once said, It is an artists duty to reflect the times in which we live.

And you know what I think?

It is also a bankers duty. Its a lawyers duty, a doctors duty, a teachers duty, an engineers duty, an entrepreneurs duty, a plumbers duty, a nurses duty. A moms and dads duty.

Class of 2021, Duke has poured all kinds of tools and resources and experiences into you.

I am asking you today to use them on behalf of our democracy. To remember just how interdependent each of us is on each other. To build communities that are healthier and safer for everyone--where everyone can live up to their full potential.

But how do we do that in practice?

Its a tough question.

When I was in high school, I entered a Black History Month essay contest, sponsored by McDonalds. Yes, McDonalds. The prompt was: How will you make Black history?

With a 15-year-olds confidence, I declared I would become a famous musician:

This, in turn, I wrote (and Im quoting myself here), will put me in a position of great influence, which I will utilize in order to be an advocate for the advancement of Blacks in America.

But how does one do that? The problems are entrenched and interconnected. There is no clear path to follow. I kept thinking: where do I even start?

During the decade since Ive become heavily involved in this fight, Ive stumbled on three answers that Ill share with you today.

First, while your schooling may be over at least for some of you the learning doesnt stop today.

It cant.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the library reading about Dr. King and other civil rights heroesFrederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells. I wasnt into comic books so much. These were my superheroes.

But even as someone steeped in the civil rights movement all my life, if you would have asked me about criminal justice when I was sitting where you all are today, I probably would have framed it as a personal responsibility issue. I think thats pretty common for those of us whove spent our lives striving for perfection. I thought that the problem was with individuals, not the system.I had family members and friends who were locked up. They messed up, and I found a way not to.

But then I learned about our countrys mass-incarceration complex: How the United States has just 5 percent of the worlds population, but 25 percent of its prisoners. How one in three Black men will serve prison time during their lifetimes. How more Black men are under corrective control today than were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War.

How much of this over-incarceration is a direct result of intentional policies that targeted people of color?

Take the war on drugs.

Our leaders said theyd wage war on drugs, but crises of substance abuse and drug addiction didnt go anywhere. Instead, this war destroyed communities. It tore apart families.

All of us have borne the brunt of that, but especially black and brown communities.

We already suffered from housing and school segregation, massive wealth disparities, chronic underinvestment. Then, these communities were specifically targeted for enforcement. Even though black, white and brown people use drugs at roughly similar rates.

And now, what should have been a public and mental health issue has turned into an excuse to disappear millions of people from their families and communities.

The more I read about all of this trauma and tragedy, the more I understood the systemic issues, the more passionate I got about doing something to change it.

So I started Free America, a campaign to reform our deeply unjust, criminal-justice system.

And the first thing we did was listen.

I met with people currently incarcerated. I met with their families. I met with survivors of crime. I met with district attorneys, corrections officers, state legislators, and civil rights activists. These folks knew a lot more than I did. I had to listen to them with an open mind and a humble spiritand then focus on amplifying their voices.

Only then could we effectively support crucial reformslike initiatives to decriminalize drugs, find alternatives to incarceration and restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated people.

Its been some of the most gratifying work of my life.But it never would have happened if I simply considered myself already educated on these issues, and stopped my learning there.

So thats lesson number one. Heres number two:

I think its natural to think you should start by tackling the biggest problem you see in the biggest possible way.

They say, go big or go home, right?

But in my experience, some of the most important work you can do starts at home, whatever that means for you.

So often, we focus on major national issues. And dont get me wrong, national issues matter.

But municipal, county, and school-board elections determine the everyday realities of our lives: Who lives where? Who goes to school where? Do we all feel safe walking down the street?

George Floyds murder mobilized a national and even global movement for change. But the truth is, most of the tangible reforms we need to reimagine public safety will come from local elected officialsthe mayors and city councils setting budgets, the prosecutors deciding how justice will be served.

And thats not just true for criminal justice reform.

Local non-profits and organizers know their communitiesand know what they need in order to fight hunger and homelessness and violence in their local area.

I know some of you are about to move to a new community, each with its own unique historical context and social fabric. And just as many of you moved to Durham four years ago and adopted this city as your own, I hope youll learn about your new homes past, present, and future. Find its changemakers and boundary-breakers. And bring your own unique gifts to the table, to engage in the real, tangible bettering of your community.

There is wisdom, strength, and power in community. Youve learned that here at Duke. But dont forget it as you find and build community elsewhere.

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John Legend: Leading With Love to Build Healthier and Safer Communities - Duke Today