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.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
A discussion should be a genuine attempt to explore a subject rather than a battle between competing egos.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places.
We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that.
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