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.
Interpretation
Our past experiences shape who we are, even if they aren't always beneficial.
Claudia Rankine's quote emphasizes that our past experiences are an integral part of our identity. They reside within us, influencing our thoughts and actions, and while not all memories serve a positive purpose, they collectively form the foundation of our understanding and interactions in the world.
In practice
Discussing the influence of childhood experiences in a psychology seminar.
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.
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.
Human life must always be defended from its beginning in the womb and must be recognised as a gift of God that guarantees the future of humanity.
Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.
A belief is only a thought you continue to think. A belief is nothing more than a chronic pattern of thought, and you have the ability - if you try even a little bit - to begin a new pattern, to tell a new story, to achieve a different vibration, to change your point of attraction.
The good four. Honest with ourselves and with whatever is friend to us; courageous toward the enemy; generous toward the vanquished; polite-always that is how the four cardinal virtues want us.
If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
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