Carolina QuotesTo deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.
Clint Smith Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- Counting Descent (2017)
- year
- 2017
no citation recorded
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“To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within our…” Clint Smith. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B510464EC1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b510464ec1
More from Clint Smith
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.
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. 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.
we should be clear that the thing that people are calling critical race theory is just — that is the language that they are using to talk about the idea of teaching any sort of history that rejects the idea that America is a singularly exceptional place, and that we should not account for the history of harm that has been enacted to create opportunities and intergenerational wealth for millions of people, that has come at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people across generations.