Clint Smith

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 the U.S. team went on its historic run to the World Cup quarter-finals in 2002, I was thirteen years old. Each game in that run - the astonishing victory against Portugal, the resilient win over Mexico, even the gutsy but unlucky effort against the Germans - propelled me to push my other athletic interests aside and focus only on soccer.

New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.

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.

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.

While violence is part of what it means to be part of the black diaspora in the United States, that is not all it means to be black.

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

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

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.

One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.

When we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't: it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not.

Silence is the residue of fear.