21 Under 21: Meet Your Future President, Nupol Kiazolu

Nupol Kiazolu is part of Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 class of 2018, which spotlights extraordinary young women, girls, and femmes making waves in their industries or passions of choice.

Nupol Kiazolu has a poster of her future hanging in her dorm room. It reads "2036."

"I look at that poster every single day," Nupol, 18, told Teen Vogue. "That's all I talk about — 2036."

When asked how she hopes her work impacts the world in 21 years, she did one better — she answered how she will be shaping the world in 18 years as the president of the United States. On her way there, though, Nupol said she hopes to reframe how the country thinks about racism. As a young activist and organizer in the Black Lives Matter movement, Nupol is already doing the work.

"If we could understand what the word itself means, we could create realistic solutions to this problem.” What it is, Nupol said, is the entire scope of systemic oppressions people experience because of their race. "If we keep thinking of racism as 'the color of your skin, I don’t like it' and that’s all, we’re never going to get anywhere."

Nupol recently started school at Hampton University in Virginia, a historically black university. There, she's continuing to work on her national Vote 2000 campaign, an effort to get young people of color registered to vote. Prior to starting college, Nupol served as the president of the Youth Coalition of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. But she began her career as an activist even earlier. Her first protest happened when she was just 13 and wore a black hoodie to school with the words, "Do I look suspicious?"on it in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder.

"Me being a young black person in America and seeing that happen to Trayvon, and also having five younger brothers, that could have been any one of us," she said. "If I lost someone in that horrific way, I would want someone to stand up for my family member. I was doing what I would have wanted someone else to do if it happened to me. It ignited a fire in my heart that I had never felt before."

For Nupol, it's the things that hit close to home that inspire her most. That's why on her way to being president she said she plans to run for office in the Brooklyn district where she's from.

"A lot of people who come from those places, from the 'hood, they don’t want to go back — and understandably so," she said. "It's a lot of trauma. I’ve lost a lot of people. I lost my dad to the streets, family and friends I lost to the streets. I can’t turn my back on future generations that are coming behind me out of the 'hood."

Nupol also said she hopes she’s changing the narrative around people who experience homelessness. In high school, Nupol said she would often have to run home after protests or organizing meetings to beat the curfew of the homeless shelter where she and her family were staying.

"My mom always raised me to give back, even when we were struggling," Nupol said. "No one had a clue. [I'd like to change] the narrative about what homelessness looks like. It was me! And I’m this leader that a lot of people look up to."

So when she's the leader of the whole country that's what Nupol will have done. She will have changed narratives and proved the odds wrong. She will have helped her people and she will have fought back against those who oppressed her. But what Nupol seems to have already keyed into is that she doesn't have to wait until 2036 to get these things done. She's already doing it.

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