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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the disparities in opportunities between the speaker and his students, revealing a sense of injustice.
Clint Smith's quote highlights the struggle of reconciling one's privileged experiences with the harsh realities faced by those less fortunate, particularly students. It emphasizes the responsibility of educators and artists to acknowledge and address societal inequalities through their work, thereby using poetry as a means of advocacy and reflection on fairness and opportunity.
Themes
PoetryOpportunityEducationInequalityFairness
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about social justice, this quote could be used to illustrate the role of educators in acknowledging privilege.
More from Clint Smith
All quotes →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.
Clint SmithRead
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 SmithRead
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 SmithRead
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 SmithRead
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 SmithRead
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