I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.
Claudia RankineI also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.
Claudia RankineHow 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 RankineYou canโt put the past behind you. Itโs buried in you; itโs turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
Claudia RankineI 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 RankineI think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.
Claudia Rankine