Clint Smith: To Protest And To Reckon With Racism In America

Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Lessons From The Summer

The killing of George Floyd by a police officer sparked massive protests nationwide. Writer, teacher, and scholar Clint Smith reflects on that moment through conversation, letters, and poetry. A version of this segment was originally heard in the June episode, Clint Smith.

About Clint Smith

Clint Smith is a writer, poet, teacher, and Emerson Fellow at New America. He is the author of the poetry collection, Counting Descent, which was published in 2016. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, among others. His forthcoming non-fiction book, How The Word Is Passed, explores how different sites across the country reckon with, or fail to reckon with, their relationship to the history of slavery. It will be published next year.

Smith's two TED Talks, "The Danger of Silence" and "How to Raise a Black Son in America," have collectively garnered more than seven million views. The latter was featured on the TED Radio Hour episode, The Consequences of Racism.

Previously, Smith taught high school English in Prince George's County, Maryland. He currently teaches writing and literature in the D.C. Central Detention Facility.

He received his B.A. from Davidson College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he studied the sociology of education.

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