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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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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's incredibly important to understand history... when it comes to inequality. "

" Blackness remains the coat you can't take off. "

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

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

" Our entire lives, we're inundated with media and messaging that tells us that to be incarcerated is to be criminal and to be criminal is to be a bad person. "

" Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans. "

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

" 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. "

" Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Silence is the residue of fear. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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