Claudia Rankine Quotes

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you're a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live - you will live together.

When you achieve it fully, you create something that's transparent - that people can move into and through their own experiences. As a writer, I don't want people spending time thinking, "What does she mean?" I want, in a way, my text to go away. So that the words on the page become a door to one's own internal investigation. It's just a passage. If the work does its job, it just opens.

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

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.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There's a letting go that comes with it.

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.

So you're just moving along and suddenly you get this moment that breaks your ability to continue, and yet you continue. I wanted those kinds of moments. And initially people would say, "I don't think I have any." Their initial reaction was to render invisible those moments weaved into a kind of everydayness.

Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.

I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, "Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen?" I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.

Intimacy is important in my work because I don't understand existence without intimacy. All of us are dependent on other people - and in ways we don't know. You cross the street and assume that person isn't crazy, they don't want to mow me down with their car. I don't know that person but I am already in a relationship with them. I am asking them to abide by the traffic laws. If they decided not to, I'd be dead. Even in those anonymous ways, we're in relationships.

I always took note of them, because I think if you're in the black or brown body, you're negotiating them all the time. It's like women taking note of sexism. It's a kind of incoherency that you are constantly negotiating.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.