The poet,essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation approximately race doesn’t need to be approximately racism. But she says all of us — and particularly white people — need to find a way to talk approximately it, or even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book,"Citizen: An American Lyric," catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how its possible to bring that reality into the open — not to fight, and but to draw closer. And she shows how we can do this with everyone,from our intimate friends to strangers on airplanes.
Claudia Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She is the author of five collections of poetry including "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely." Her plays include "The Provenance of Beauty" and "The White Card."
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Source: wnyc.org