Clint Smith Quotes
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Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?
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The U.S. prison system, over all, disproportionately affects black and brown people, but people of color are overrepresented to a greater degree in private prisons.
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Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans.
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Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.
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Schools shouldn't have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks. But these are the positions that far too many schools have been placed in, and only a meaningful acknowledgment of the problem can begin the process of getting them out.
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Silence is the residue of fear.
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We tend to think of racism as this interpersonal verbal or physical abuse, when in truth, that is only one way that racism manifests itself. The reality of contemporary racism is that it while it is ubiquitous, it is often invisible, subsequently making it more difficult to name and identify.
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Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being.
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One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.
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I'm not sure that there are days of my life when I'm not confronted with racism. For some, that may seem hyperbolic, but it's true.
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Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.
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Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.
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The presidents and the founding fathers and all of the people we sort of raise up as false idols, we don't wrestle with the fact that many of these were brilliant men, but they were also men with deep prejudices against people of color, against indigenous people, against women.
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New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
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Our entire lives, we're inundated with media and messaging that tells us that to be incarcerated is to be criminal and to be criminal is to be a bad person.
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The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.
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Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
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'A Talk to Teachers' showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.
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The moral abhorrence of private prisons has been brought to our attention by courageous acts of investigative journalism, illuminating scholarship, and the work of activists who have decried the social stratification brought about by our prison systems.
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Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time.
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With 'Black Panther,' black artists were provided with the opportunity and agency to create art that captures the full range of their imaginative possibilities. It matters that Chadwick Boseman is the protagonist and is supported by a cast of nearly all black characters.
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Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.
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This idea of shared humanity and the connections that we make with one another - that's what, in fact, makes life worth living.
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While violence is part of what it means to be part of the black diaspora in the United States, that is not all it means to be black.