89
" Tell me a story, he says, wrapping his arms around me.
Yesterday, I begin, I was waiting in the car for time to pass. A woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine. Our eyes met and what passed passed as quickly as the look away. She backed up and parked on the other side of the lot. I could have followed her to worry my question but I had to go, I was expected on the court, I grabbed my racket.
The sunrise is slow and cloudy, dragging the light in, but barely.
Did you win? he asks.
It wasn't a match, I say. It was a lesson. "
― Claudia Rankine , Citizen: An American Lyric
97
" People like Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. "
― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation