The following is an excerpted graduation speech delivered by a communist high school student to their graduating class of 2021.
I am gonna begin this speech just like every other high school senior who is speaking at graduation by congulating us for persevering through the past 16 months of adversity.
I know I can speak for everyone when I say that it has been difficult to stay motivated and confident through online learning, constant worry of sickness, and crowded households. But with the continuous support of our teachers and classmates, we persevered!
We are here today because of all the hard work we have done through one of the most unconventional and difficult high school experiences in history.
But the truth is, our celebration goes far beyond making it through the past 16 months of covid.
As students in a predominantly Black and Latin school in a racist education system, our high school adversity started four years ago. We have undergone four years of oppressive metal detectors, four years of being told “put your metal items in your bag,” four years of being treated like criminals. Despite the DOE [Department of Education] trying to infect our brains with the false idea that we are not meant to succeed, we’ve fought and won. Our diplomas are our trophies. We are all here proving them wrong.
However, today we are not celebrating enduring racism, we are celebrating fighting racism.
In ninth grade, we entered a community that had spent years building an antiracist and multiracial environment. We saw that and we flourished.
We recognized the DOE’s purposeful separation between all the schools within our building and created and joined campus council to help ease tensions. We spoke with students at the mainly-white high school and realized that we are more alike than we are different. Campus council has held multiple successful school wide game nights, movie nights, and parties. We fought and we won.
We observed the disparity between the sports teams, what the mainly-white school in the building had access to versus what we had access to. Students, teachers, and faculty united and worked to get us more sports teams. We fought and we won.
We continued to fight to merge the sports teams with ours to build comradery and unbeatable teams. This year, PSAL [Public Schools Athletic League] could no longer ignore the continuous calls for change and combined the sports teams. We fought and we won.
And just like we won our fight for an integrated building, we will win our fight against metal detectors. Today, we celebrate the combined sports teams, and in the future, the graduating seniors will give speeches celebrating the removal of the metal detectors.
The platform that we’ve been given to speak up for ourselves and fight against inequity is only possible from the foundation built by the students before us. We have successfully continued the work of our predecessors to help enable the victories of our successors. We have done our work to ensure that the school we are leaving today is a better, stronger, and more resilient school than it was when we entered.
We’ve created unforgettable memories that we, and the faculty here will cherish for the rest of our lives. And while I’m sad that I cannot sit here and reminisce about prom or our senior trip, we had four years worth of fun in the just two and a half years we had in the building.
So here’s to every joke made in spanish class, every picket line outside of the building, every nail biting basketball game that had us on our feet, every laugh, tear, and every schoolwide gathering in the auditorium where we got to cheer for our friends while they did some embarrassing performance for vocal class.
My high school has shaped us into the amazing students, friends, and antiracists that we are today.
It is now our job to take what we learned, both academically and politically, into the next chapter of our lives. Every college that we occupy deserves to hear the echoes of our school slogan the second we step on campus: “An injustice to one is an injustice to all.”
As a senior class, we’ve fought, we’ve won, and we will never stop fighting.