I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
Interpretation
Sports often reveal societal issues related to race that we may deny exist.
Claudia Rankine's quote highlights the complex intersection of race and sports, suggesting that while society may try to overlook racial issues, sports often act as a stage where these dynamics are publicly displayed. This reflection encourages a deeper examination of how race influences perceptions and interactions within a space that is often perceived as meritocratic and unified.
In practice
During a panel discussion on race relations, one might reference this quote to address the visibility of racial issues.
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.
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.
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.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
We trample the blood of the Son of God underfoot if we think we are forgiven because we are sorry for our sins.
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
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