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.
Clint SmithRead
Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.
Interpretation
Ignoring history does not eliminate oppression; it remains a reality regardless of what is taught.
Clint Smith's quote highlights the importance of acknowledging and teaching history, particularly the difficult and oppressive chapters. It suggests that oppression exists independently of our willingness to confront it, and the omission of these topics in education does not erase their impact on society. Recognizing these truths is essential for understanding and addressing the injustices that persist.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about social justice, a teacher might use this quote to emphasize the importance of including all historical perspectives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.
There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder.
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.