Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Clint Smith
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Clint Smith.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
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.
There is a solidarity that black people can find in celebrating the athletic success of our own, especially in sports where our existence is sparse.
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.
New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
'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.
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.
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have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks.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.
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.
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.
As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.
When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don't forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life.
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.
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.
'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.
America's economy cannot be disentangled from the free labor that built it, just as America's culture cannot be unbound from the black artists who cultivated it.
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.
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.
Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.
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.
Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?
People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.
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.
Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
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.
Silence is the residue of fear.
If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
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.
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.
Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
While the most disadvantaged students - most often poor students of color - receive the most considerable academic benefits from attending diverse schools, research demonstrates that young people in general, regardless of their background, experience profound benefits from attending integrated schools.
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.
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.
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
Education is a human right - a recognition of dignity that each person should be afforded.
Until lawmakers can disentangle property taxes from public education, inequalities - perpetuated by the Supreme Court and Congress - will persist.
In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams.
Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.
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've been a follower of Arsenal Football Club since I was ten years old.
One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.
Sometimes sports serves as a reprieve from politics, and sometimes it serves as an extension of it.
School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.
Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home.
To be an Arsenal fan is to convince yourself that you can no longer support a team that disappoints you, only to be drawn back in by the ever-flickering promise of something better.
This idea of shared humanity and the connections that we make with one another - that's what, in fact, makes life worth living.
I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is simply no better way to generate buzz for soccer in your country than having your team in the World Cup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.
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.
So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms.
I think about the history of racism in this country all the time.
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