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" Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home. "
Clint Smith
Black
Seriously
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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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" 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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" New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud. "
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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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" 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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" A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage. "
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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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" 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. "
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Son
Moment
World
" 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. "
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Ocean
Parents
Skin
" 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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Culture
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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. "
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Logic
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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. "
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History
American
Work
" 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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People
Time
Saying
" 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. "
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Create
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" 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. "
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Inequality
Action
Policy
" 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. "
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Political
World
People
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Education
Life
Goals
" 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. "
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Suffering
Us
Empathy
" Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed. "
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Support
Practice
Death Penalty
" So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms. "
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Like
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Shaped
" Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released. "
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Fantasy
Abolition
Slaves
" 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. "
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Women
Indigenous People
Men
" In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams. "
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School
Soccer
Made
" Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results. "
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Action
Diversity
More
" 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. "
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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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Scout
Way
Adolescence
" Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being. "
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Racism
Well-Being
Away
" 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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Fear
People
Feel
" 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. "
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Experience
People
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" Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter. "
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You
Just Because
Chapter