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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and mourning systemic injustices faced by Black individuals rather than seeking separation or retaliation.
Claudia Rankine points out how the Black Lives Matter movement distinguishes itself from earlier black-power movements. Rather than focusing on fighting back or segregating for self-preservation, it emphasizes the collective grieving for those who have died due to systemic racism and ensures that their memories are honored and not forgotten, urging society to confront these issues head-on.
In practice
In a speech at a social justice rally, one could reference this quote to highlight the importance of remembrance in the fight against racism.
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.
Donald Trump is trying to build a wall. I'm trying to burn walls down and build more bridges.
We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.
You can change all things for the better when you change yourself for the better.
No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens.
For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
The Revolution did not assume a socialist nature because of support from the U.S.S.R.; it was the other way around: support from the U.S.S.R. was produced by the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution. To such a degree, that when the U.S.S.R. disappears, Cuba keeps on being socialist.
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