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" Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice? "

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

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

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

" In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Preparing oneself for the possibility of confronting racism triggers something that slowly chips away at physical and emotional well-being. "

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

" 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. "

" We inculcate young people with the message that if they don't succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color. "

" 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. "

" When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don't forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life. "

" Until lawmakers can disentangle property taxes from public education, inequalities - perpetuated by the Supreme Court and Congress - will persist. "

" My childhood closet was ornamented with U.S. jerseys of World Cups spanning the nineties and two-thousands - some of my favorite memories are from summers when, with a ball under my foot and a jersey on my back, I watched the U.S. team go up against the world's best players in the largest sporting event on Earth. "

" 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. "

" To be clear, affirmative action is not, by itself, an adequate response to decades of systemic looting, but it has been an indispensible tool in inching us towards some semblance of a more equitable society. "

" The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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