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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else. Claudia Rankine Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Claudia Rankine Read Quote
There are two worlds out there – two Americas out there. If you’re a white person, there’s one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you’re a brown or a black body, there’s another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It’s very close to the loss of your life. Claudia Rankine Read Quote
When you’re writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don’t know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows? Claudia Rankine Read Quote
As African-Americans, that’s what’s being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it’s because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body. Claudia Rankine Read Quote
