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Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine Quotes

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Famous Claudia Rankine Quotes

“Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck with the full weight of a man in blue. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds. In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way to asphyxiation, to giving up this world, and then mama, called to, a call to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say their names, white silence equals violence, the violence of again, a militarized police force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever contracts keep us social compel us now to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out to repair the future.”

PoetryChangePoemFutureRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack Lives MatterPolice BrutalityProtests
Author:Claudia Rankine
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“I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son. "The condition of black life is one of mourning," she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality. At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.”

RaceDangerRacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional Racism
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
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“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experience as citizens.”

AmericaRaceCitizensRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhite SupremacyWhitesInstitutional Racism
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
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“After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.”

RelationshipsFriendshipRacismBiasAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesUnconscious Bias
Book:Citizen: An American Lyric
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