As each school year ends, we pause to honor a class of students who have reached the threshold of adulthood, diploma in hand, and step boldly into their futures. This year, we celebrate you—the Diverse Class of 2025—not only for what you’ve achieved, but for what you represent.
Graduation of Tabb H.S., Yorktown, Va., June 12 (Bil Kleb/Flickr Creative Commons)You’ve grown up in a world that has challenged, changed, and complicated the idea of unity. You’ve witnessed debates—sometimes loud, sometimes quiet—about who belongs, who matters, and who gets to shape the future. Yet through it all, your class has been a living testament to the truth that America’s strength lies in its diversity.
Diversity isn’t just about race or ethnicity, though these identities matter. It’s also about language, religion, family background, personal ability, identity, thought, and experience. It’s the quiet student who loves coding. It’s the outspoken activist for climate action. It’s the aspiring electrician, the first-generation college student, the artist, the caretaker, the poet, the pragmatist. You’ve seen that no one story defines a class. And that’s precisely the point.
You graduate in a time when some leaders cast suspicion on the very word “diversity,” suggesting it’s a threat to tradition or a zero-sum game. But you know better. You’ve lived the truth that diversity is not subtraction. It’s addition. It doesn’t diminish excellence; it multiplies it. It doesn’t limit opportunity; it expands it. It doesn’t divide a nation; it knits it together—if we let it.
So let’s say it clearly: Congratulations to the Diverse Class of 2025. You’ve already proven that strength doesn’t come from sameness but from showing up fully as who you are and respecting the same in others. You are the future not in spite of your differences but because of them. And as you move on—whether to college, to careers, to service, to families of your own—we hope you carry this with you. The power to shape your life, and our shared world, lies in embracing the full spectrum of what it means to be human.
You are ready. You are worthy. And you are beautifully, powerfully diverse.
Congratulations, graduates.
