Hi, you're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. What does it do to black children when they can't simply be children because someone else's biases could get them killed? Who gets to be seen as fully human in our societies? These are the questions that poet and educator Clint Smith wrestles with in his beautiful

gripping archive talk, which is also a spoken word poem from TED 2015.

Growing up, I didn't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did.

Like, why did I really have to mow the lawn?

Why was homework really that important? Why couldn't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal? My childhood was

abound with questions like this. Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes

it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn't exactly understand why.

And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically.

Their parenting always thought to reconcile the tension

between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world

while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable.

I came to realize that this in and of itself

was a very purposeful form of education. One of my favorite educators, Brazilian author and

scholar Paulo Frere, speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool

for critical awakening and shared humanity.

In his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he states,

no one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, this idea of humanity, and specifically who

in this world is afforded the privilege of being

perceived as fully human. Over the course of the past several months, the world has watched as unarmed

black men and women have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante. These events

and all that is transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood

...