The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes how language can expose the subtle yet pervasive effects of racism in our daily interactions.
Claudia Rankine's quote highlights the importance of language as a tool that illustrates the undercurrents of racism in everyday situations. By pointing out the 'daily encounters' and 'little moments,' she draws attention to how these seemingly minor interactions are influenced by societal structures of racism, suggesting that the way we communicate often reflects deeper societal issues.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might quote this to discuss how subtle racism affects daily life.
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.
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.
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.
I learn with great concern that [one] portion of our frontier so interesting, so important, and so exposed, should be so entirely unprovided with common fire-arms. I did not suppose any part of the United States so destitute of what is considered as among the first necessaries of a farm-house.
I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.
Since life is an ever evolving process, one should flow in this process and discover how to actualize and expand oneself.
This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
We have believed - and we do believe now - that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible
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