Claudia Rankine Quotes - Page 2

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• Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

  Claudia Rankine

  Art, Pieces, Narrative

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

  Claudia Rankine

  Hurt, Thinking, Desire

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

  Claudia Rankine

  Two, Three, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

  Claudia Rankine

  Animal, Thinking, People

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.

  Claudia Rankine

  Claudia Rankine (2014). “Citizen: An American Lyric”, p.121, Macmillan

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• I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.

  Claudia Rankine

  Race, Intimacy, Investigating

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• You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn't belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.

  Claudia Rankine

  Role Models, Roles, Racist

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.

  Claudia Rankine

  Believe, People, Have Faith

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.

  Claudia Rankine

  Want, Lasts, Economy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, "What's wrong with me?" and begin to ask the question, "What's wrong with this place that I'm in?"

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, People, Term

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.

  Claudia Rankine

  Space, Police, Black

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named.

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, Yale, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.

  Claudia Rankine

  Athlete, People, Role Models

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.

  Claudia Rankine

  Mistake, Should, Ifs

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than the rest of the population. That didn't stay very aggressively in the book, but that's how it started. I began to document these moments as support for this other thing I was thinking about, and then the moments themselves began to take over.

  Claudia Rankine

  Book, Heart, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

  Claudia Rankine

  Communication, Thinking, Violence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here." And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.

  Claudia Rankine

  Mistake, Believe, Forgiving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

  Claudia Rankine

  Moving, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

  Claudia Rankine

  Writing, Thinking, Mirrors

  "I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies". Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. December 10, 2014.

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• For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."

  Claudia Rankine

  Men, Thinking, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad.

  Claudia Rankine

  Mean, Let It Go, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, Why Not, Body

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, Two, Availability

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.

  Claudia Rankine

  Book, Ideas, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

  Claudia Rankine

  People, Understanding, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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