Iyana Corley
Staff Writer
The future starts with us. In the political climate we live in, it is no longer enough to simply exist and hope for the best. Standing for nothing is not neutrality. It is a slow surrender. If you do not take a position, one will be chosen for you. Many of us are familiar with the weight of that realization, the quiet ache of feeling incomplete, the lingering thought of “I should have done more.” That feeling does not come from laziness or apathy. It comes from being taught, repeatedly, that survival is not enough, that presence must always be justified and that silence is safety.
We are often told that discomfort is a necessary part of growth, but rarely are we allowed to ask whose comfort is being protected in the process. For Black students, discomfort is not a temporary challenge, it is a constant condition. It appears in classrooms where our ideas are questioned before they are considered, in institutions that celebrate diversity in statements but resist it in practice and in spaces where we are visible as symbols yet invisible as people. We learn early how to code switch not only our language but our emotions. We learn how to speak without being labeled aggressive, how to advocate without being seen as ungrateful and how to exist without taking up “too much” space.
There is an unspoken curriculum many of us are forced to master. It teaches us how to make ourselves smaller without disappearing, how to be exceptional without being intimidating and how to endure without complaint. Exhaustion becomes normalized and burnout is framed as a personal shortcoming rather than a structural one. In these environments, we are encouraged to chase a version of completeness that always feels just out of reach, as if wholeness is something we must earn rather than something we inherently deserve. The result is a generation of students who are deeply capable yet constantly questioning whether they are doing enough, being enough or giving enough.
Despite all of this, we are still here. Not by accident nor by permission. The future does not belong to institutions that refuse to evolve or to systems that depend on our silence to remain intact. The future belongs to those who are willing to imagine themselves beyond limitation. It is being built in late nights spent studying after long days, in student meetings where voices shake but sound anyway, in conversations that double as survival strategies and in moments when we choose ourselves even when it feels risky. Resistance does not always look loud or visible, sometimes it looks like persistence, community and a refusal to disappear.
Choosing to stand for something does not mean having all the answers. It means rejecting narratives that frame our discomfort as weakness or our exhaustion as inadequacy. It means understanding that advocacy does not always look like protest. Sometimes it looks like asking difficult questions, protecting one another or refusing to internalize spaces that were never designed to hold us fully. When we show up as ourselves, even imperfectly, we interrupt the idea that we should be grateful simply to be included.
The future starts with us because it has to. We cannot afford to wait for permission to feel safe, valued or whole. We are not guests in these spaces and we are not temporary. We are builders of our communities, our narratives and our futures. Every time we choose intention over silence, presence over erasure and collective care over isolation, we create something stronger than the systems that have tried to us in the first place.