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" 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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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth. "

" Silence is the residue of fear. "

" Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Indigenous People

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms. "