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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the shift from demanding civil rights to seeking internal recognition of systemic issues.
Claudia Rankine's quote contrasts the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which sought immediate, tangible demands for justice with a readiness for sacrifice, to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, which emphasizes the need for deeper recognition and understanding of racial issues. It underscores the evolution of activism, from external changes to the necessity for internal acknowledgment of social injustices.
In practice
During a seminar on social justice, this quote could be used to illustrate the evolution of civil rights movements.
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.
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.
If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.
There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.
Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.
Something is very wrong when our federal and state governments have a high tolerance for the unrestricted distribution of weapons of mass destruction, and it would be wrong to let this deadly form of neglect continue to facilitate bloodshed across America.
If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.
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