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" 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. "
Clint Smith
Say
Matter
Fear
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" It's incredibly important to understand history... when it comes to inequality. "
Clint Smith
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History
Important
" In my home, guns were not something to be earned or celebrated. Water guns and Nerf guns were not allowed outside. B.B. guns were not even a part of the conversation. "
Clint Smith
Home
Guns
Conversation
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Black
Find
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks.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
" 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
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Opportunities
Me
Life
" 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
" 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
Living
Connections
Humanity
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Racism
Days
My Life
" 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
" Blackness remains the coat you can't take off. "
Clint Smith
You
Blackness
Off
" 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
" Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed. "
Clint Smith
Support
Practice
Death Penalty
" 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
Moral
Work
Prisons
" A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage. "
Clint Smith
Someone
Cage
Walk
" People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves. "
Clint Smith
People
Want
Believe
" So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms. "
Clint Smith
Like
Tradition
Shaped
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Slavery
People
Black
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Focus
Effort
Victory
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Suffering
Us
Empathy
" 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
" 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. "
Clint Smith
Political
World
People
" 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
" In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams. "
Clint Smith
School
Soccer
Made
" 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
" In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance. "
Clint Smith
Dance
New
Hometown
" 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