Below are excerpts from speeches by three student delegates at the inaugural International Congress of Youth Voices in San Francisco, held over three days in August 2018.

Beatrice Phiri, 20, Lusaka, Zambia

What if I had to cut one tree, and plant five more back? What if every person planted a tree on their birthday or anniversary? This always seems impossible until it’s done a common saying by the late Tata Nelson Mandela.

Ladies and gentlemen, climate change is an issue that needs every persons attention, you may think you have not been affected by it because you haven’t noticed it, well in one way or the other we all have had a feel of it.

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Imagine what this world would be if we continue turning a blind eye on climate change. We will have more dried rivers and lakes, no sustainable energy, more world fires, more polluted air and other climate change problems.

It all starts by you and I taking a step of change, by you and I making the polices that we already have on paper into action. Only action is what is needed now.

Vivian Pham, 17, Sydney

One of the things that has been most revolutionary and most revealing, to me, is to recognise the imperialists, oppressors, fanatics and dictators in history that looked like me. Up until very recently, I genuinely believed that every white person in the world, somewhere, anywhere, was plotting my destruction and trying to colonise me.

And I used to dream of traveling back in time to a Vietnam hidden from the French, unscathed from the war waged in the name of Americans that spat my father and millions of others out of their country, forced them onto a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, praying for water to be more than water, for wood to be more than the weight it can hold; I used to dream of a Vietnam of simplicity and prosperity, of thatch roof huts and banana leaves and lotus flowers.

People with faces like mine have not always been victims

But this Vietnam only exists in my imagination, which I’m still guilty of tricking myself into thinking is my memory. We cannot romanticise a past that never was, and only choose to remember the innocence of our history. Spoiler alert: nobody’s history is innocent. We must be brave enough to claim it all.

People like me, who by today’s standards are referred to as “people of colour” or “minority groups”, belong to histories which are not only as tremendous, as grand, and as civilised as the Europeans, but as brutal. People with faces like mine have not always been victims. We have had our empires too. We have been both the coloniser and the colonised; we know, intimately, both ends of the whip, have felt it in our hands and against our backs. I think sometimes, especially in a safe space like this, it is very easy to hold hands and chant together by the fire of our own righteousness. It is very easy to think that we are in a particularly awful situation, at the mercy of particularly awful forces. But by understanding the mentality of imperialism, which is, essentially, a struggle for authority, we can make sure that we don’t replicate the same power imbalances wearing different faces.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We will have more dried rivers and lakes, no sustainable energy, more fires.’ Photograph: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury / Barcro

Samuel Getachew, 15, Oakland, California

If we are able to talk about race frankly and boldly, without fear of language, we are able to truly transcend above the baggage that these words carry, and shake off the negative associations that we have tied so closely with them. Mind you, I said “words”, and not “slurs.” Oftentimes, we say “black” when what we really mean to say is “victim”. We say “black” when what we mean is “criminal”. We say “black” when what we mean is “dangerous”, or “lazy”, or simply “dead”.

And too often, we try to find other words, like “African American” or “Ethiopian” or “Ugandan” or “Angolan” – which are all perfectly fine words and help us to find our own specific identities – but these are detrimental when what we are really trying to talk about is “blackness” – from around the world, in its beauty, its pain, its richness, and as a whole.