Because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying.
“Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” What was in your mind when you wrote that line?
When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of blackness in their minds. Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked “like a demon”. And I don’t disbelieve it. Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.Why is it so hard to call out racism?
Because making other people uncomfortable is thought worse than racism. It has taken me a while to train myself to speak out.…
In a New Yorker article you wrote: “There really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed simply for being black.” What is needed if empathy is useless?
I’m not saying that anything can be enough. Empathy is not a cure.
— from an interview with Claudia Rankine in The Guardian, Dec 2015