Quotes from Claudia Rankine

The sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter: Or; as there are billions of live, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered.

It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex. We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that's too complex.

A friend writes of the numbing effects of humming and it returns you to your own sigh. It's no longer audible. You've grown into it. Some call it aging--an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experience as citizens.

History's authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You give back the lack. You hold everything black. You give yourself back until nothing's left but the dissolving blues of metaphor.

Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.

When the boys turned the corner was inflammation in the air already forming knuckles as they pummeled the body being kicked and beaten until knocked unconscious his right eye closed shut blood refusing to clot flowing from both ears were they hearing their own breathing their own ears allowing their blows to take custody of this body fallen against the hardness of the concrete floor leveled without give?

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. I

No one can get behind the feeling that caused a pause in the match, not even the player trying to put her feelings behind her, dumping ball after ball into the net. Though you can retire with an injury, you can't walk away because you feel bad.

The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don't interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn't have. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.

How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?

Hegel argued that death is used as a threat to keep citizens in line. The minute you stop feating death you are no longer controlled by governments and councils. In a sense you are no longer accountable to life.

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.

And you are not the guy and and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever--you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus.

As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling." —

There are benefits to being without nostalgia. Certainly nostalgia and being without nostalgia relieve the past.

The purpose of art," James Baldwin wrote, "is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky's statement that "we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.