Clint Smith > Quotes

“In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Your life is only possible because of his ability to have walked through this country on fire without turning to ash.”
― Clint Smith, Above Ground: Library Edition

“How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.”
― Clint Smith, Above Ground: Library Edition

“The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labour. It is in the detailed architecture of some of the city's oldest buildings, sculpted by enslaved hands. It is in the roads, first paved by enslaved people.”
― Clint Smith

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers): Remembering Slavery and How It Shaped America

“you do not go to a garden to watch
the flowers grow
you go to give thanks
for what has already bloomed.”
― Clint Smith, Above Ground: Library Edition

“Our stars weren't meant for their sky. We have never known the same horizon.”
― Clint Smith