Clint Smith Quotes
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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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Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
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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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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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Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
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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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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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I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 kind of follow in the tradition of some folks - some thinkers and scholars I really look up - who reject the idea of intellectual compartmentalization.
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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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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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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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Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.
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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.