I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in. Claudia Rankine More Quotes by Claudia Rankine More Quotes From Claudia Rankine I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named. Claudia Rankine black yale thinking I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body. Claudia Rankine body feelings add The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra. Claudia Rankine feelings book ideas The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person. Claudia Rankine understanding people world We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you. And when they fail you in these ways, it signals a larger understanding about who you are as a black person in the world. It's not just a little failure for me. Its something exposed. Claudia Rankine black understanding people If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake. Claudia Rankine ifs should mistake I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person. Claudia Rankine found firsts thinking How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies. Claudia Rankine availability two thinking My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad. Claudia Rankine let-it-go mean way The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays. Claudia Rankine offering facts firsts The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. Claudia Rankine I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy. Claudia Rankine investigating intimacy race Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. Claudia Rankine dead fight black matter When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Claudia Rankine alone yourself you tired The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Claudia Rankine recover american never imagination The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact. Claudia Rankine daily language racism book I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't. Claudia Rankine pretend think race sports The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Claudia Rankine future black matter culture If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition. Claudia Rankine king service change life A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done. Claudia Rankine good politics poetry people
