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

It's incredibly important to understand history... when it comes to inequality.

The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.

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.

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.

Until affirmative action is described and understood as one mechanism by which to make amends for historical wrongdoing against members of marginalized communities, it will fail to meaningfully address the inequality that exists as a direct result of federal policy.

As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.

The most important and brave thing someone can do, I think, in the face of dehumanization, is to continue to assert their humanity.

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

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

Living under the perpetual and pervasive threat of racism seems, for black men and black women, to quite literally reduce lifespans.

Our entire lives, we're inundated with media and messaging that tells us that to be incarcerated is to be criminal and to be criminal is to be a bad person.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

The benefits of prison education go beyond lowering recidivism rates and increasing post-release employment. It can also rekindle a sense of purpose and confidence.

'A Talk to Teachers' showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

Schools shouldn't have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks. But these are the positions that far too many schools have been placed in, and only a meaningful acknowledgment of the problem can begin the process of getting them out.

So often, our sporting allegiances are shaped by family tradition, passed down like heirlooms.

Young people are constantly absorbing - through media, textbooks, and policy - the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.

With 'Black Panther,' black artists were provided with the opportunity and agency to create art that captures the full range of their imaginative possibilities. It matters that Chadwick Boseman is the protagonist and is supported by a cast of nearly all black characters.

When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.

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.

Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair.

When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don't forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life.

The presidents and the founding fathers and all of the people we sort of raise up as false idols, we don't wrestle with the fact that many of these were brilliant men, but they were also men with deep prejudices against people of color, against indigenous people, against women.