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I humbly and gratefully accepted my sixth honorary degree from Long Beach City College yesterday. Much more importantly, I also had the enormous privilege of crafting a speech for more than 5,300 members of the Class of 2025. It was the most ethnically diverse group of graduates to whom I have delivered a commencement address. They looked like California and reflected the very best of America.
My message was originally crafted for graduates in yesterday’s audience. But I honestly hope it inspires all persons who earned degrees from higher education institutions across the U.S. this spring. Hence, I am sharing it here.
Graduates, what our nation needs most at this time is you.
I am proud of you. The president of this extraordinary institution is proud of you. The faculty who taught you and staff who invested into your success are proud of you. Your parents, siblings and other family members are proud of you. Your community is proud of you. You should be absolutely proud of you.
We need you to leave this place not only with a sense of pride, but also with optimism, hope and determination. We need you to not become discouraged like so many others who have understandably lost faith in our nation’s ability to fully and equitably enact its unrealized commitments to equal justice under the law and other democratic ideals. We need you to still believe that what has never been somehow, some way still can become. We need you to be the somehow, the someway that America has too long awaited.
Indeed, we need nurses who know how to nurse with excellence, accountants who know how to expertly account, dancers who are amazing at dancing, bakers and pastry artisans who dazzle us with their culinary brilliance, filmmakers who make us laugh and cry, scientists who find cures and treatments for illnesses, and firefighters who help us extinguish and contain devastating flames. We need educators like me who create inclusive classrooms that make space for a diversity of viewpoints and identities.
In every major in which degrees are being conferred onto the Class of 2025, we need experts, hard workers, collaborators, problem solvers, uniters and innovators.
Every sector in America also needs professionals who recognize the value that diversity adds to our society and economy. We need managers and executives who know how to create inclusive workplaces where every team member experiences a sense of belonging, respect and safety. We need leaders who are uncompromisingly committed to ensuring that women receive equal pay for equal work, and that employees of color, people with disabilities and queer people have equitable opportunities for professional advancement. We need leaders who know how to win the fight for immigrants and poor people.
Previous generations have failed to deliver much of this. We need you to be the class of college graduates that finally delivers. Be the class that inspires every cohort that follows you to replicate, sustain and improve what you started. The America that America purports to be can start right here, right now, with you.
We need you to tell the truth about the ugly partisan politics, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism that ruin people’s lives and poison our country. But we also need you to work individually and in coalition with others to dismantle the structures and systems that cyclically reproduce these and other evils.
We need you to reach and work across the aisle in ways that contemporary politicians have proven themselves incapable of doing. We need you to be the people who declare that it is past time for us to stop fighting each other and start working together in pursuit of shared goals for our democracy. We need you to be the college graduates who remind us that united we stand, divided we fall.
What our nation especially needs at this very moment are courageous leaders who will protect our planet from the catastrophic effects of climate change. We need health-care professionals who will confront their implicit biases, treat all patients with dignity and respect, and reverse long-standing health inequities that disproportionately disadvantage AAPI, Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. We need visionary leaders who will finally eradicate educational and wealth inequities. We need leaders who are committed to defending science, research, truth and evidence—people who will stand up to the spreaders of misinformation and disinformation, as well as to those who recklessly attack diversity, equity and inclusion.
You, who persevered to become the first in your families to graduate from college, are what America needs right now.
You, who made the dreams of your immigrant families come true by earning your college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who yourselves are immigrants who came to this country with nothing but have earned a degree or certificate that could transport you out of poverty and into the middle class, are what America needs right now.
You, who survived poverty, food insecurity and homelessness to make it here to your college graduation, are what America needs right now.
You, who know firsthand what it is like to be discriminated against because of where you are from, how you talk, how you look and who you love, but yet, refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices, are what America needs right now.
Even those of you who have no firsthand experience with discrimination but yet also refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices are what America needs right now.
You, who served your time, turned your lives around, were released from jails and prisons, then ultimately inspired others in your communities by earning college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who bravely served in our nation’s military, then came to college and are graduating today with the same enduring commitments to freedom—thank you for your service—you are what America needs right now.
You, who are committed to building and protecting a just and equitable nation that none of us have ever seen, are what America needs right now.
Eighteen states are yet to elect a woman governor—she could be you. The United States needs its first woman president—she could be you. Fortune 500 companies need more indisputably qualified CEOs and executives who reflect our nation’s diversity—that could be you. Higher education will soon need a new generation of professors and administrators to educate and ensure the success of future students—that could be you.
Class of 2025, what our nation needs most at this time is you.
Long Beach City College graduates generously responded to this address with thunderous applause. I will forever cherish and appreciate that moment. My hope is that these words similarly inspire members of the Class of 2025 all across a nation that so desperately needs them.
