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.
Interpretation
Our past experiences shape who we are, even if they aren't always beneficial.
Claudia Rankine's quote emphasizes that our past experiences are an integral part of our identity. They reside within us, influencing our thoughts and actions, and while not all memories serve a positive purpose, they collectively form the foundation of our understanding and interactions in the world.
In practice
Discussing the influence of childhood experiences in a psychology seminar.
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.
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.
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.
If heaven is understood more as God's space on earth than as an ethereal region apart from the essential reality we know, then what happens on earth matters even more than we think, for the Christian life becomes a continuation of the unfolding work of Jesus, who will one day return to set the world to rights.
I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.
I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things.
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That's how prayer works.
World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.