The actor Viola Davis urged Barnard College graduates to connect with the past – even if it is painful – at a commencement ceremony Monday night.

“History is not the past, it is the present. We carry history with us. We all are history,” Davis said in a keynote address at the women’s college in New York City.

History can contain triumph and failure, the Oscar winner said, and Americans should own up to both.

Davis cited the US constitution as an example: despite it being “the greatest document with the greatest mission statement”, it was written during a time when “slavery was an institution, Native Americans were being slaughtered, and women were fighting for their lives”.

After slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment, she noted, Jim Crow laws emerged. “Own the fact that that was America,” she told graduates, before connecting it to more personal advice.

“Own all the memories and the experiences, even if they were traumatic,” she said. “The world is broken because we’re broken. There are too many of us who want to forget. Who said that all of who you are has to be good?”

Turning to her personal history, Davis spoke about growing up in poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She recalled a night when she was nine years old and her parents were in an intense fight. “It was so bad, I was screaming on top of my lungs,” she said.

She ran to the bathroom and shut the door, still screaming. She knelt down on her knees and prayed to God. She asked him to “take me away from this life” after she counted to 10. After she was done counting, she said, “he left me there”.

“So I gained vision and strength and forgiveness. I can remember what it’s like being a child who was hungry. I can remember what it means to be in trauma. I can remember poverty. I can remember what it means to be a child who dreams and sees no physical manifestation of it,” she said.

“I can remember it because I lived it. I was there. That has been my biggest gift. You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”

Davis capped off her speech by talking about a recent skydiving trip, which she called “the ultimate exercise in letting go, tackling my fears and freedom” on Twitter. The instructor told her that after she stepped out of the plane, all she had to do was “put your hands up, your head back and fall”.

After the trip, holding up her hands became her “Wakanda salute to my sisters”, she said, referring to the fictional African country in the Marvel film Black Panther. As she held up her hands to the graduates, she delivered her parting advice: “You can either leave something for people, or you can leave something in people.”