Claudia Rankine

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. ”

The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact. ”

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. ”

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't. ”

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition. ”

A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else. ”

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money. ”

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. ”

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. ”

How do you keep the black female body present, and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to? It's a question I try to answer through my own life. ”