Clint Smith Quotes
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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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In many ways, the very notion of school choice operates under a false pretense - an assumption that every child has the same set of choices to make and the same places to choose from.
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We inculcate young people with the message that if they don't succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.
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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.
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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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The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity.
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Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
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Until lawmakers can disentangle property taxes from public education, inequalities - perpetuated by the Supreme Court and Congress - will persist.
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One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.
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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.
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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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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.
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We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.
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To be clear, affirmative action is not, by itself, an adequate response to decades of systemic looting, but it has been an indispensible tool in inching us towards some semblance of a more equitable society.
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Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released.
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Growing up in New Orleans, I was always the only black kid, or one of two, on the school soccer team. While I was always conscious of this status, what took precedent was my unfettered love of the game.
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When the U.S. team went on its historic run to the World Cup quarter-finals in 2002, I was thirteen years old. Each game in that run - the astonishing victory against Portugal, the resilient win over Mexico, even the gutsy but unlucky effort against the Germans - propelled me to push my other athletic interests aside and focus only on soccer.
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Each holiday season, as family members arrive and couches are unfolded, my household settles into a palpable nostalgia. Poorly designed photo albums are pulled from the shelves. Home videos of prepubescent siblings in matching pajamas dance across the television screen.
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There is simply no better way to generate buzz for soccer in your country than having your team in the World Cup.
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After high school, I earned a scholarship to play Division I soccer at a small school in North Carolina, but I didn't get much playing time, which forced me to determine who I was beyond the field, something I had previously never had to do.
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Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair.
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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.
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I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.
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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.