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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.
Clint Smith -
It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.
Clint Smith
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Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
Clint Smith -
There is simply no better way to generate buzz for soccer in your country than having your team in the World Cup.
Clint Smith -
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.
Clint Smith -
Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
Clint Smith -
A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.
Clint Smith -
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.
Clint Smith
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If our principles are only our principles when it is convenient for us, when they align with our visceral emotional responses, then they are, in fact, not principles at all.
Clint Smith -
When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.
Clint Smith -
In sixth grade, my status as a Boy Scout was not something I went out of my way to share. In fact, I spent most of my adolescence attempting to keep it a secret from those who might use it as a source of derision. The off-brown collared shirt and forest-green sash were not something I would have ever been caught wearing in front of my friends.
Clint Smith -
The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there.
Clint Smith -
'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.
Clint Smith -
I kind of follow in the tradition of some folks - some thinkers and scholars I really look up - who reject the idea of intellectual compartmentalization.
Clint Smith
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I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.
Clint Smith -
New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
Clint Smith -
I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.
Clint Smith -
To operate with the aspiration of color-blindness in a country whose central operating mechanism for centuries has been race belies the logic of race-neutral public policy. Public policy must account for the historic and intentional pillaging of resources experienced by black Americans.
Clint Smith -
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
Clint Smith -
Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair.
Clint Smith
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The benefits of prison education go beyond lowering recidivism rates and increasing post-release employment. It can also rekindle a sense of purpose and confidence.
Clint Smith -
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.
Clint Smith -
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
Clint Smith -
The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity.
Clint Smith