Top 60 Clint Smith Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I’ve had with opportunities my students aren’t given and how profoundly unfair that is.

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.

Education is a human right – a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

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.

‘A Talk to Teachers’ is emblematic of Baldwin’s proclivity for candor over political appeasement and, like much of his work, focusses on history and the American consciousness.

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don’t.

‘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.

One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.

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.

When the power of private prisons is diminished, so, too, is their ability to engage in back-door political lobbying that has an impact on public and private prisons alike.

Blackness remains the coat you can’t take off.

Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.

My childhood closet was ornamented with U.S. jerseys of World Cups spanning the nineties and two-thousands – some of my favorite memories are from summers when, with a ball under my foot and a jersey on my back, I watched the U.S. team go up against the world’s best players in the largest sporting event on Earth.

The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity.

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.

My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn’t steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn’t make a memory of this skin.

Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released.

In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn’t have to be something that is imbued with more despair.

New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I’m from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.

When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don’t forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life.

Who has to have a soapbox when all you’ve ever needed is your voice?

Do those serving life sentences deserve access to educational opportunities never having a future beyond bars? The answer is yes and necessitates that in-prison education serves additional goals beyond reducing recidivism.

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.

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.

I think about the history of racism in this country all the time.

Until affirmative action is described and understood as one mechanism by which to make amends for historical wrongdoing against members of marginalized communities, it will fail to meaningfully address the inequality that exists as a direct result of federal policy.

Oppression doesn’t disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.

Sometimes sports serves as a reprieve from politics, and sometimes it serves as an extension of it.

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.

There is simply no better way to generate buzz for soccer in your country than having your team in the World Cup.

Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.

A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.

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.

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.

Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.

The beauty of the World Cup is that while thirty-two countries get to cheer for their respective teams, the event also affirms a global pluralism – it is as much a festival of cultural multiplicity as it is a competition featuring some of the best athletes in the world.

Young people are constantly absorbing – through media, textbooks, and policy – the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.

When we say that black lives matter, it’s not because others don’t: it’s simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not.

I’ve been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

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.

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.

I’ve been a follower of Arsenal Football Club since I was ten years old.

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.

This idea of shared humanity and the connections that we make with one another – that’s what, in fact, makes life worth living.

In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.

In my home, guns were not something to be earned or celebrated. Water guns and Nerf guns were not allowed outside. B.B. guns were not even a part of the conversation.