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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the fragile nature of citizenship for African-Americans, especially in the context of violence against them.
Claudia Rankine emphasizes the precariousness of citizenship for African-Americans, suggesting that societal perceptions of black individuals significantly influence their treatment and rights. The reference to the tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown illustrates how these events reflect deeper systemic issues regarding the recognition and value of black lives in the context of citizenship.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might say, 'As Claudia Rankine points out, our citizenship is at risk and must be protected.'
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.
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 think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
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.
The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.
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.
In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.
Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
If we seek the Buddha outside the mind, the Buddha changes into a devil.
The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.