Note: This is a transcript of a speech the author delivered at Middlebury College on November 13, 2016. Credit is attributed to Bruk Adane for creative contribution.

On the day after the election, a lot of us gathered here now met in the Anderson Freeman Resource Center. We met to share what we thought, what we felt, others, ourselves. Someone said that they left Bosnia, which they described in terms of ethnic violence, the cults of hatred, of racism. They said that “Bosnia had followed them” now. Another person reported seeing an attempted suicide on the bridge to town. Yet another told us all they would stay here at Middlebury, to get their education - even if their parents were deported. We were unified in that hot swell of the tears that boiled over us all, and that deep, pregnant haze that clung to our campus.

I stayed awake for a long time, and I know I wasn't the only one.

At the AFC, I asked us all what was to be done. My community, back home, has the largest percentage of undocumented immigrants in the nation. Las Vegas' backbone is “illegal.” Everyone from my closest friends, to the workers that serve the pale, fat cats in Trump Tower are guilty of the great, horrendous crime of trying to improve the welfare of their families. In our world, voting by your feet makes you a criminal. No matter that undocumented immigrants are following the same sort of hope as countless generations of white immigrants. Crossing the Atlantic makes you a pilgrim, a hero; crossing the Mexican border makes you a rapist, a terrorist.

What's the difference? Is the American Dream destined to always remain just the "white man's dream?"

The day after we met in the Anderson Freeman Resource Center, the reports started to stream in. Hate crimes have bred like flies across this nation. You know what the experts say? There's been more hate crimes than in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Muslims were crucified in the streets for crimes they did not commit.

But we've surpassed even that dubious period. While we mourned, Penn students of color were threatened with lynching. While we mourned, an NYU Muslim prayer room was graffitied with the name of this country's new President-elect. While we mourned, high school locker rooms were spray-painted with #whitesonly, or #whiteamerica, or even “now the white people are going to take over.” Students at a middle school began chanting, “Build the wall! Build the wall! Build the wall!” And in our very own, “liberal” Middlebury College, two Muslim students came out of their room to see, “Fuck Muslims #Trump2016” on their doors.

And you know what the victims were told? That they were liars. Just like survivors of sexual assault, the victims were told that they were making things up. Just like blacks have been told at every single instance of police brutality, the victims were told that they were trumping up their claims of oppression. Videos were blatantly ignored; pictures were labeled the products of Photoshop. Evidence was sacrificed at the altar of, “let's just wait and see.”

Because we have to give Trump a fair chance, right? We have to listen to all those articles that have begun sprouting up, just as hate crimes continue to accelerate, about how this country's President-elect is becoming more moderate now that he's elected? Will we give a chance to someone who has enabled even greater persecution of the poor and marginalized, who threatens our communities and our families?

No. We cannot afford to sit still and wait. We must move forward—organized, coordinated, resistant, relentless. We will feel our emotions, and we will channel those into constructive channels to protect those who need protection. Every single person here can offer something to the movement that begins right here, right now. We are not professional protesters, or activists with endless resources. Not all of us are members of the cultural organizations, those citadels of justice on campus, and we will not rise up in protests at every moment as a collective student body. Even as we speak, there are people in their dorms slaving over essays with bags under their eyes. I'm sure that'll be quite a few of us at some point or another. We are students.

But we are more than that. We are a community, unified in this space, and each and every one of us has a responsibility to stand up for justice in our own individual ways. If you can't scream, then write. If you can't write, then draw. If you can't draw, then speak out to your friends and acquaintances at every moment that they conform to the status quo that oppresses the marginalized—whether in dining halls, over phone-calls, or on social media. If you can't speak, then stand as a human shield for those in need. If you can't stand, then exist as a living refutation of the cult of hate that has seized this country. Do not participate in systems that exclude those who must be heard.

Every single person here can do something. And every single person here must do something.

In the coming months, we will continue preparing the movement here on campus. We will move to democratize faculty decision-making, allowing our student body to be heard in the process by which our teachers are chosen and allowing diversity to be a real value at Middlebury College. We will move to unionize the employees of the institution, who continue to be exploited in less-than-living wages by the College. We will move to protect the migrants and refugees who live in the shadow of the state of Vermont, now facing a greater threat than at any time in this era of American history. We will move to raise up the voices of Blacks, Natives, Latinx, Asian-American, and every other group still unheard. We will move for inclusivity and real equality. We will not do so because we can, but because we must.

In his landmark Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates said:

“Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard."

And that's what we will do. We will hold this country to an exceptional moral standard. We will not tolerate systems of oppression in each other or ourselves, here or anywhere else. If they come for immigrants, we will resist. If they come for Muslims, we will resist. If they come for the LGBTQ community, we will resist. If they come for people of color, we will resist. If they come for the disabled, we will resist. If they come for the workers, we will resist. And if they dare to pit any marginalized group against another, we will resist.

We will resist.