The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.
Interpretation
Feeling a lack of belonging can be more painful than physical injury.
This quote by Claudia Rankine highlights the deep emotional pain that arises from feeling isolated or excluded in one's environment. It underscores the human need for connection and belonging, suggesting that the psychological hurt from social alienation can be profound and damaging, far surpassing physical harm.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the importance of community and support in schools.
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.
I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.
If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.
They say it's the white man I should fear, But it's my own kind doin' all the killin' here.
What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.
I don't care if you're black, white, short, tall, skinny, rich or poor. If you respect me I'll respect you
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