Clint Smith Quotes
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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 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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Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.
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Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
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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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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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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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'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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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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Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time.
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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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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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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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Until lawmakers can disentangle property taxes from public education, inequalities - perpetuated by the Supreme Court and Congress - will persist.
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I've been a follower of Arsenal Football Club since I was ten years old.
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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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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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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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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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Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.
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Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.
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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.
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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.