Claudia Rankine

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

— 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 brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.”

— Claudia Rankine

“-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.”

— Claudia Rankine

I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language…

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of…

— Claudia Rankine

I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first…

— 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

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

— Claudia Rankine

One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float…

— Claudia Rankine

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

— Claudia Rankine

Yes, and the body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which…

— Claudia Rankine

“If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this? / Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.”

— Claudia Rankine

For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they…

— 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

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

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

“Memory is a tough place. You were there.”

— 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

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

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know.…

— Claudia Rankine

I always took note of them, because I think if you're in the black or brown body, you're negotiating them all 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 wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to…

— Claudia Rankine