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" '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. "
Clint Smith
History
American
Work
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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. "
Clint Smith
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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. "
Clint Smith
High School
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Time
" This idea of shared humanity and the connections that we make with one another - that's what, in fact, makes life worth living. "
Clint Smith
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Connections
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" 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. "
Clint Smith
America
Culture
Black
" Until lawmakers can disentangle property taxes from public education, inequalities - perpetuated by the Supreme Court and Congress - will persist. "
Clint Smith
Supreme Court
Congress
Will
" '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. "
Clint Smith
Teacher
Me
Work
" Silence is the residue of fear. "
Clint Smith
Silence
Fear
" 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. "
Clint Smith
See
Career
Engineering
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Fear
People
Feel
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Political
Impact
Alike
" Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being. "
Clint Smith
Racism
Well-Being
Away
" It's incredibly important to understand history... when it comes to inequality. "
Clint Smith
Inequality
History
Important
" Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results. "
Clint Smith
Action
Diversity
More
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Teachers
Process
Problem
" 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. "
Clint Smith
School
Man
Culture
" Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair. "
Clint Smith
Sometimes
Despair
Girl
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Support
Yourself
You
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Racism
Name
Reality
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Literature
Lie
Truth
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Doubt
Death Penalty
Support
" 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. "
Clint Smith
School
Choose
Choices
" Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released. "
Clint Smith
Fantasy
Abolition
Slaves
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Children
People
World
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Emotional
Fact
Only
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Learning
Think
Grow
" Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans. "
Clint Smith
Women
Living
Men
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Up
Country
Injustice
" In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams. "
Clint Smith
School
Soccer
Made
" Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot. "
Clint Smith
Bullet
Blood
Whether
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Culture
Truth
Speak