Claudia Rankine

“That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmanoeuvred years, had you in a…

— Claudia Rankine

I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that…

— Claudia Rankine

You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that…

— Claudia Rankine

“You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You give back the lack. You…

— Claudia Rankine

How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as…

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

“Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe and to breathe you have to…

— Claudia Rankine

I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating…

— Claudia Rankine

The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we…

— Claudia Rankine

My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say…

— Claudia Rankine

The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we…

— Claudia Rankine

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants…

— Claudia Rankine

We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail…

— Claudia Rankine

I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than…

— Claudia Rankine

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.…

— Claudia Rankine

You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model…

— Claudia Rankine

Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really…

— Claudia Rankine

I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are…

— Claudia Rankine

The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen.…

— Claudia Rankine

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own…

— Claudia Rankine

I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems…

— Claudia Rankine

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or…

— Claudia Rankine

“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining…

— Claudia Rankine

I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular…

— Claudia Rankine

Intimacy is important in my work because I don't understand existence without intimacy. All of us are dependent on other people -…

— Claudia Rankine

For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were…

— Claudia Rankine