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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the stark disparities in experiences of citizenship based on race in America.
Claudia Rankine's quote emphasizes the existence of two distinct realities in America based on racial identity. It illustrates the systemic inequalities that people of color face, suggesting that for them, the concept of citizenship is fraught with danger and violence, contrasting sharply with the experiences of white citizens who enjoy greater safety and privilege.
In practice
During a panel discussion on social justice, this quote can be used to highlight systemic racism.
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.
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.
Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
Without peace, there is little hope for human rights
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.
If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.
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