7 Quotes by Claudia Rankine about blacks
- Author Claudia Rankine
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How to care for the injured body,the kind of body that can't holdthe content it is living?
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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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.
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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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.
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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Nobody notices, only you've known,you're not sick, not crazy,not angry, not sad--It's just this, you're injured.
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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because white men can'tpolice their imaginationblack people are dying
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- Author Claudia Rankine
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Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.
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