Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankineis a poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Rankine is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
americas brown citizen close death life loss white worlds
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.
happen intimacy reader work
When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
imagination
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.
although itself plays pretend sports
I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.
money
You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.
continues earlier forgetting front lives matter movements refuses tried unlike
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.
both creates goes love saves
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.
attempt bears both dynamic exist future inherent lives matter mourning movement open regarding state
The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.
begins determines language places reveals
The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.
above feeling good lyric people personal poetry politics realm rise
A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
browns certain citizenship loose michael played shot understanding
As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
role-models racist might
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.
space police black
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.
writing thinking mirrors
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.