Clint Smith Quotes
born 1988 United States
Clint Smith (born August 25, 1988) is a writer, poet and scholar living in the USA. He is the author of Counting Descent and How the Word is Passed.
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Random Clint Smith quote
16 quotes
Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.
To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.
Counting Descent (2017)
Rewatching the Freedom Riders documentary, seeing the face of a young John Lewis, and I'm reminded of how so many of the ppl who spit on, cursed at, & assaulted these riders are ppl who are still alive today. Still alive, still voting, still here. None of this was that long ago.
It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance'
How the Word is Passed (2021)
I simply cannot imagine having access to that much wealth (a billion dollars is one thousand stacks of a million dollars!) and thinking that using a minuscule percentage of that money to make sure other people have access to food, homes, and education was a bad thing.
I've said this before, but for all the people who believe you definitely would have been abolitionists in the era of slavery, who you are today is who you would have been then. You don't need to imagine scenarios of living in the 19th century, there's work to do here and now.
I've said this before, but if you're doing an MLK day service project consider bringing King-level analysis to it. Don't just serve lunch at a soup kitchen, interrogate why millions of ppl live in poverty in the first place. King's legacy isn't about charity, it's about justice.
I'll keep saying it, keeping millions of ppl in poverty is a choice this country makes every day. There is enough money for ppl not to be evicted from their homes, there is enough for ppl not to go hungry, there is enough for ppl to avoid jail bc of a parking ticket. It's absurd.
At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.
How the Word is Passed (2021)
Black-and-white photographs and film footage can convince us that these episodes transpired in a distant past, untouched by our contemporary world. Segregation shaped every aspect of my grandmother's education.
How the Word is Passed (2021)
Saying "I worked very hard for it" to justify your position as a billionaire is one of the most absurd things I can imagine when there are people working multiple jobs who still don't make enough to feed their children and pay their rent.
Just so we're clear, there is no way to have an honest conversation about immigration from Central America without talking both about the impact of climate change and about a history of US intervention that politically and economically destabilized many of these countries.
Worth repeating that all of the police violence you see happening right now has been happening for a long time before there were any camera phones to record it. It's a daily phenomenon in communities across the country. It's structurally embedded into how these forces operate.
do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?
Counting Descent (2017)
Spent this week in Senegal & have been thinking about how activists there are pushing to have the street signs named after French colonists removed in ways paralleling the fight to take down Confederate statues. It was a reminder how global the fight against white supremacy is.
When I think of emancipation, I think of all of the people who fought for freedom but who never got a chance to experience it. The end of slavery did not happen overnight, it came from intergenerational work by those who fought for a better world they knew they might never see