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.
Interpretation
The body holds onto past experiences and memories, influencing our perception and resilience.
In this quote, Claudia Rankine reflects on the idea that our bodies carry the weight of our past experiences, which shape our consciousness and how we engage with the world. She suggests that despite our attempts to remain resilient and optimistic, we cannot erase the memories and moments that have impacted us, highlighting the complex relationship between physical presence and emotional memory in our lives.
In practice
In a discussion about trauma and healing, one might say: 'As Claudia Rankine wisely notes, the body has a memory.'
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.
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.
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.
No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.
The Trinity is the basis of the gospel, and the gospel is a declaration of the Trinity in action.
Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity than straigthforward and simple integrity in another. A knave would rather quarrel with a brother knave than with a fool, but he would rather avoid a quarrel with one honest man than with both. He can combat a fool by management and address, and he can conquer a knave by temptations. But the honest man is neither to be bamboozled nor bribed.
Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.
The true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, and where every man may read them for himself.
I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
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