Jasmine Johnson

Hello, my fellow graduates, faculty, staff, volunteers and families. It is truly an honor to stand before you today. Congratulations, we made it!

I would like to give a personal shoutout to my family and tribe that helped me through my journey. I want to take a moment to acknowledge my family, both chosen and appointed, that are no longer with us. Because of them, I am. I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors.

For the past two years, we had to pivot in place. Despite the new variants of the day, we made it here to celebrate with each other. We learned new modalities and hybrid classes weren’t classes for X-Men, but we all learned to recognize our superpowers. We received the power of being beautiful and brilliant people, truly from within ― as some occasions called for our masks and handy dandy hand sanitizers.

It is our unity that gives us strength. My personal strength is my superpower. My resilience had me moving at the Speed of Bright. At the Speed of Bright, my anxiety couldn’t defeat me. At the Speed of Bright, convincing myself after 10 years in the making I would get my master’s degree, work full time, and help my family. At the Speed of Bright, I used my voice and my words to advocate for justice and equity for all. At the Speed of Bright, I realized that anything was possible if I simply believed it to be so, and through our collective brightness, we can trailblaze many galaxies.

My advice to you: Give yourself permission to be you and just put one foot in front of the other.

When I was a child, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was one of my favorite movies. There was a song in the movie that went, put one foot in front of the other. It goes on to describe that if you put one foot in front of the other, you will soon be walking across the floor. Then eventually your efforts would lead you to a door. As I think about us all being here today and our different journeys, I can’t help but realize that we put one challenging class in front of another, and soon, we will be throwing our caps in the sky and soaring through a door of limitless possibilities. Cheers!

Jasmine Johnson came to UT Dallas from Richardson High School. She is graduating with a degree in public affairs. She has been involved with Leadership Richardson and received the Texas City Management Association Clarence E. Ridley Scholarship. She served on the board of directors for the United Nations Association Dallas chapter and raised funds for hygiene products that benefited the Dallas ISD Homeless Education program as the staff liaison to the UT Dallas ODEI Student Diversity Advisory Council. She worked as the program coordinator in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UT Dallas, creating spaces of inclusion for underrepresented minority students, faculty, and staff to celebrate their diversity. She is a Safe Zone ally and Mental Health First Aid advocate. She has won the American Heart Association Empowered Stories Filmmaker award for her advocacy work spotlighting the food desert in South Dallas, her family’s neighborhood. Over the past six years, she has been advocating for social justice for all and working on equity initiatives through school projects, her respective communities, and her day-to-day life. After graduation, she plans to continue her education in the public affairs field.