Claudia Rankine Quotes

Any ideas of 'other' are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of 'normal.'

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

I think gender plays a part in most things, but I don't know how it would be different because I've never been a man. And my fame is different from Nicole Kidman's or Sharon Stone's. I think everybody's fame is different.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

I just can't help but see things differently.

I is another.

To think that everybody's like you is silly.

Everything about me was different.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

Well, think of what I’m doing to you right now. For me I’m the self, and you’re the object. For you, of course, it’s the exact opposite—you’re the self to you and I’m the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally.” “I still don’t get it, but it sure feels good.” “That’s the whole idea,” the girl said.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

Of course, there are different truths on different levels. Things are true relative to other things; "long" and "short" relate to each other, "high" and "low," and so on. But is there any absolute truth? Something self-sufficient, independently true in itself? I don't think so.

I always say, if you think it’s over the top then tell me where the top is first. I don’t think anyone can. But if you can tell me where the top is then I’ll tell you whether or not I’m over it.

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.

Mother of otherness, Eat me.

I never thought about being the first black actor to win, even though everybody else talked about that. If I stop to think as a black actor, people will see me differently. If I play as a black actor, people will only see that. I think my key was to perform as an actor, not as a black actor. And after winning the Cesar, I was an actor with a Cesar. there are many more adjectives to describe who I am. I'm not only black.