Claudia Rankine

"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come...

"At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces...

"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial--a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one. "It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as a historical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic--in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend...