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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Schools play a crucial role in promoting social mobility and addressing past injustices through equitable education.
In this quote, Clint Smith emphasizes the profound impact that education systems have on social mobility in society. He argues that by recognizing historical injustices and enacting laws that address them, we can leverage schools to mitigate inequality and create a more equitable future for all students. The commitment to reform in the educational system is fundamental to achieving social change and fostering opportunities for everyone.
Themes
EducationMobilityInequalityJusticeReform
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting about educational reform, this quote can highlight the importance of investing in schools.
More from Clint Smith
All quotes βIn 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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From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.
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I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there's no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.
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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
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In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.
Michaela CoelRead