How does Citizen as a text query and challenge the idea of what it means to be a “citizen”?
16 thoughts on “Citizen Response”
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How does Citizen as a text query and challenge the idea of what it means to be a “citizen”?
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Zachary Maluccio
4/23/19
Citizen Response
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen challenges our definition of citizenship by highlighting inconsistencies within the expectations between white and black communities. Written with a focus on the present day, two instances within the novel stood out to me.
First, Rankine’s analysis of Serena Williams spoke volumes to me as a person who used to deny that Williams was being discriminated against. Having played tennis my whole life, I have always follow Serena’s career, and I will say that she has had clear instances of bad sportsmanship. As such, it is easy to write off the extra problems she faces as a result of her own mistakes. Over time, with the help of discussions among other tennis friends, it becomes clear that Serena’s career is ridden with examples in which the higher tennis organizations have failed to come to her defense. There are plenty of tennis players with bad attitudes (search: Fabio Fognini). Rankine herself points out John McEnroe, who came to Serena’s defense following a bad foot fault violation. McEnroe was notorious for have an awful spirit, particularly to umpires. Still, McEnroe was never viewed in the same light as Williams was in 2009; where he was seen a crybaby, Serena was considered a bully, which is a testament to little more than the color of their skin.
Second, Rankine discusses the nature of “Stop and Frisk” protocols within inner cities, even intentionally repeating a line which speaks to the entire novel. “Still you are not the guy but still you are the guy because there is only one guy that fits the description”(109). This spoke to me in two ways. First, the nature of our police system is that even well-intentioned officers will arrest the wrong person simply due to an apparent similarity to the culprit, the color of their skin. This can be found across society; Rankine exhibits another example early in the lyric when discussing her friend who was babysitting. Second, I realize that, as a white man with moderate build, I will never be mistaken for the perpetrator in the same manner that a black man with a similar size to me may encounter.
Dan Frazo
4/23/2019
Citizen Response
In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the nature of life as a black American is explored as it is seen with the backdrop of a white society. The book on multiple occasions expresses the implicit and explicit racism that each and every minority member of American society faces. Explicitly, we witness the flagrant discrimination of African-Americans in the case of Serena William’s unfair losses over her tennis career, among others. Implicitly, we as the readers see many cases in which the speakers race comes as a surprise or a commodity: “When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black” (44).
With this both direct and implied racism, it is clear that being a citizen entails overlooking and thus condoning this system of oppression and class-based hierarchy. Long has the white man been the dominant character as part of the “culture of power” in the occidental world. Any challenge to this learned storyline is a threat to the society already in place.
For African-Americans, or minorities of any kind, citizenship is then a form of behavior. It’s a demand for those who are not ethnically a part of the dominant group to abide by their rules. It’s an expectation that any minority member of society will walk into any school or job interview with the same degree of social capital that any white member would have. It’s the obligation for any non-white American to respond amicably and respectfully to any discrimination they may face, or do face, or have faced for so many years. In the case of Serena Williams, upon her lashing out at the umpires for clearly race-based calling, it’s the labeling of justified frustration as animalistic and unsportsmanlike.
To be a citizen in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is to subject oneself to discrimination and prejudice and police brutality and reduced housing availability and failing schools and unwanted pity, knowing fully that any sign of opposition to this system will only add to its oppressive power.
Fahmid Rashid
April 23, 2019
Citizen Response
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is not just a book; it’s an amalgation of poetry, prose, and criticism on what it truly means to be a ‘citizen’. The entire book, divided into seven chapters, is sprinkled with micro-aggressions; some of which are anecdotes of Rankine and her friends’ own experiences, while others, such as in Section 3, are of micro-agressions towards other individuals – such as the 2007 Rutger’s women’s basketball team. This image, as revealed in a later paragraph, refers to the women which were called “nappy-headed hos” (42) by Don Imus on live television.
From the beginning of the book, Rankine aims to involve the reader in the text through her use of second-person narration and the repetition of “you”, making this individual universal and omnipresent : “You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind you asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. … she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person” (5). Much of the first half of the book maintains this storytelling structure, the subject “you” — the reader, regardless of race, becomes an object of white indifference or ignorance.
The journey one embarks as they read this book becomes a process of experiencing the constant ignorance and negation towards ‘blackness’ – while in Citizen this does mainly apply to the US, it can be extended to the entire world as a whole. Rankine’s poetic stories illustrate the pervasiveness of racial ignorance and oppression due to white privilege. It is made blatantly evident that this sense of inequality and inequity is widespread and prevalent everywhere, whether it be standing in line in a drugstore, “…it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you… Oh my God, I didn’t see you…No, no no, I really didn’t see you” (77), or as one waits for a friend “…She is, he says, beautiful and black, like you” (78). Despite the obvious differences between one person to the next, through Citizen Rankine highlights that blacks are different than whites, and that society makes it apparently so that it makes them invisible and all the same – without an identity, and much like the definition of a citizen, without a legally recognized sense of self.
Ben Arriola
4/23/19
Citizen Response
Prof. Cassarino
Rankine’s text challenges the validity of the equality of post segregation America and asks her readers to imagine life as a permanent outsider. Rankine describes situations being screamed at by her therapist, being confused with other black colleagues and having the police called on her friend for talking on the phone outside her house. The therepist in question had sounded professional over the phone, but as soon as Rankine arrived the therapist treated her as an enemy, an outsider, some member of some lower group. Her writing testifies that America has not moved past racism. While the mechanics of it may have evolved, become subvertly rather than overtly violent, American society is still in many ways a closed group. In Citizen, ‘You’ cannot schedule a therapist appointment, talk outside on the phone, or have an individual identity. ‘You’ are separated from the rest of society, confined to a handful of stereotypes and condemned to a lower caste. While legally a citizen, ‘you’ are something else, a lower subset of the word. Doors may be open, but once you walk inside you will be isolated. No matter what ‘you’ achieve or overcome, ‘you’ will still belong to a seperate group that still belongs to a lower category of citizen.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen challenges what it means to be a citizen: a member of a society that should be entitled to the same rights as every other member. It asks what it means to be pulled over and stopped and frisked only a block from your house only to be cited for a crime that the officer had specifically said you did not commit. Rankine uses language that conveys disbelief but also the horrifying idea that the disturbing injustices that happen are quite normal. The narrator begins the section “Stop-and-Frisk” with the recollection, “I knew whatever was in front of me was happening and then the police vehicle came to a screeching halt in front of me like they were setting up a blockade” (105). In Rankine’s world, the narrator is a citizen often numb to the inequities that are only felt by some people in the described society.
The narrator goes on to describe that “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you” (146). This means blending into other people, losing individuality. Many scenes in Citizen describe a person losing their perceived worth, not even having the voice to fight back due to the oppressive nature of the system. The narrator just wants to “belong” and be viewed as an equal but instead can’t even determine the correct subject to use for an event. They say “I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done, was also done, was never done” (146). This discombobulated phrase speaks to the haze in which citizens that are not viewed as citizens have to go through life.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen presents a series of prose, scripts, photographs and paintings that challenge of the definition of “citizen” in terms of being black in the United States. Through writing in second-person, a direct call is made to listen. A call that readers cannot shy away from, but rather read each word and sentence with more weight. With the title of “Citizen”, and the use of second-person point of view, the lyric has the ability to resonate with audiences of color, and challenge the inclusivity of a “citizen” for white audiences. The white-centric nation that Rankine establishes in her writing alludes to a white-ownership over the nation, and the constant “othering” and exclusion of people of color. Rankine conveys two definitions of a “citizen” – the black experience as a citizen, and the white experience. By process of crafting two separate definitions through a series of interactions and images, the racial disparity between blacks and whites in the United States is presented.
Rankine vividly highlights the degradation and prejudice towards blackness in the United States and the major role of silence in this process. After interactions as extreme as the neighbor’s calling the police on a person of color for being in the driveway, or a therapist violently screaming at a patient of color when arriving to their appointment as they had only ever met over the phone, silence is presented. Meager apologies and silence that do not amount to subsistence are the repetitive reactions. As Rankine presents a series of moments with persons of color, the repetitiveness of the diminishing behavior dissolves to responses of invisibility. On page 77, “no, no, no I really did not see you” stresses the invisibility that black people encounter in the presence of a white person, relating to the ways in which people of color are ignored, silenced, and not viewed by society. Following this, on page 78, the speaker is seen solely for the color of their skin and pushed out of their individuality as the interaction compares them to another person of color. Rankine heightens the invisibility of blackness to a interaction of grouping people of color together and demonstrates the loss of individuality that comes with it. As a “citizen” is a recognized status, Rankine challenges the status by illuminating the constant silence, invisibility, and loss of individuality that occurs during interactions between people of color and whites. Through conveying the lack of recognition and acknowledgement of people of color in the nation, Rankine argues the title of “citizen” as only applicable to those who are heard and recognized in the nation.
Kelly Campa
April 23, 2019
Citizen Response
Claudia Rankine’s definition of citizenship is explored through her explanations of the various microaggressions that black individuals must face in the United States and around the world. In this, she challenges the definition of citizenship as an absolute identity by law and instead highlights the ways in which black citizens are treated differently within their own country. Rankine conveys many anecdotes of her everyday interactions with people as a black woman in America, including her experience being “invisible” in school, being ostracized on airplanes, and watching her neighbors call the police on her friends. She credits these microaggressions to “a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary” (32). In this, her definition of citizenship includes the trials one must constantly suffer and live through in order to be a citizen. She describes a moment in which she and her partner are pulled over and she convinces them to act cautiously, leading to a realization: “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on” (151). Here she conveys that citizenship comes with a price, referring to the persecution of the black community in America. Her words suggest that it is impossible to be a black citizen without suffering everyday levels of prejudice.
Citizenship is a strange concept that leads to two strangers who live thousands of miles apart and who will never meet in their entire lives feeling a strong connection and familiarity to one another. In my Global Migration class, we talk regularly about the effectiveness / ineffectiveness of citizenship. It is both a legal status and a embodiment of the ethos of the nation (referring to a country’s people, vs. the defintion of the “state” as a country’s government), often revealed through the asking of “who gets to be a citizen of the United States?” However, we often discuss how citizenship is a construct that assembles invisible borders between similar peoples and provides legal justification for discrimination.
This is within the context of global migration and in border zones; however, it is just as true to racial/ethnic groups existing within a country. All of the characters in Rankine’s stories, including herself, are citizens of some country or another. However, the ostracization of the black characters throughout Citizen suggests the metaphorical statelessness of the black community. Those who are stateless belong to no country and hold no citizenship; in Citizen, African-Americans are treated to daily microaggressions in which white people around treat them as though they are stateless non-citizens. It is perhaps fair to say that the racial divide in America is strong enough that a white person would feel much more affinity with a white person thousands of miles away that they will never meet than with the black person who lives in their neighborhood, and vice versa.
Citizen is a novel centered around the implicit and explicit othering of black individuals, and highlights the ever-present racism in a supposedly “equal” America. By doing so, Rankine battles between what it means to be a citizen of the United states as a person of color versus a white individual. She gives a multitude of examples to demonstrate the disparity between the day to day life of a black person and a white person.
These examples portray the societal hierarchy, where people of color find themselves at the bottom because of institutionalized, systemic racism. For example, Rankine reflects on Serena Williams and her othering as a black tennis player in a predominantly white sport. Specifically, Rankine incorporates an image of Caroline Wozniacki, a competitor of Williams’, who played a “harmless” joke by imitating Serena’s figure, thus objectifying her for her body and simultaneously her blackness. In this book, Serena is portrayed as a citizen of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), as a matter of fact she was number one in the world at the time, so she should have been at the top of that societal hierarchy. Yet, Serena became othered by her blackness. Instead of highlighting her beauty and historic accomplishes in the world of tennis, Rankine demonstrates how the media playfully joked about Wozniacki’s “joke.” Rankine contrasts this image with Williams’ celebration after winning a major tournament in which she briefly does the “crip walk.” The white media responded to this dance by labeling the actions as completely unacceptable because of their association with gangs. The tennis “citizenry” does not take into account the systemic segregation and the detrimental effects of the war on drugs on black people that often are forced down a road of organized violence as a means of survival not choice. The contrast between the reaction of the white association in reaction of Wozniacki’s direct objectification of the black body versus their outrage at Sernas’s playful celebration after becoming one of the most decorated female tennis players of all time, is the epitome of Rankine’s illustration of the disparity between white and black citizens. Though they may be “equal,” while in a white society, Rankine demonstrates that, the judgments of privilege will dictate action.
Isabella Cady
22 April 2019
Citizen Response
Rankine takes both her lived experience and that of others and communicates similarities and differences through poetic interpretations of the mundane. She highlights diversity of perspective in order to beg the question of who actually is a citizen in the face of a lurking, suppressive society. At one point, Rankine repeatedly asks, “have you seen their faces” (83)? Her question, posed around her reflections on the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, highlights a major theme that laces the rest of the story and the body of her narrative of injustice–so frequently, the privileged, the white mass, does not actually see the struggle of the suppressed bodies. Yet, those very people are the ones “taking custody of his body” (100), and brutalizing it in the process.
To be a citizen in the context of Citizen is to see the people who so frequently remain unseen. In the conventional sense, citizenship means engagement in country, mainstream discussion, and to be informed and involved. Rankine takes these elements of citizenship and makes her readers engage in in plight of her content, her experience, and the experiences of those that she cites and analyzes throughout the novel. She challenges what it means to be a whole citizen in the context of the people around you, to know what is happening beyond lived experience.
In some sense, she begs the question of the role of community. How communal is this country if it rejects the lives of so many, if it allows for the marginalized to continue to sink under the weight of systemic injustice? At one point, Rankine writes, “It’s just this, you’re injured” (145). Most of Citizen cites pain and highlights the scarring of inequality and hatred. Rankine seems to emphasize the repeated injury unto Black bodies, deep cuts of emotional labor and neglect that are harmful to any hope of equity.
Citizenship for the privileged is getting rid of embarrassment and making room for anger. It is giving space for the marginalized to cry out, to heal, and to prosper. I think of the example of Serena Williams, who is accepted for her talent but not heard for her rage. Privilege within the scope of whiteness seems enamored with complacency, infatuated with suffocating identity with the stained tools of our suppressive culture. Rankine’s authorship doesn’t tolerate an uncomfortable reader, it beckons and demands agency and acknowledgement. In some sense, the best way to understand Rankine is to become a citizen of her own text, to listen to her narrative and let it guide our actions as readers.
Rankine winds up her conclusion by answering her own title, reflecting, “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on” (151). But, given the pages of examples of pain, invisibility, and white fragility, Rankine suggests that “let[ing] it go,” is not the answer, rather, holding on to and holding up histories of oppression is a step in the right direction.
Augie Schultz
Citizen Response
4/22/19
Prof. Cassarino
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: an American Lyric encapsulates the sentiments of Black Americans persevering through life as citizens in the United States. Titling the experimental prose-verse hybrid “Citizen” is ironic because of the idealistic, ambiguous nature of the term, stripping members of a community of their gender, class, and race, unifying them all as citizens. However, as Rankine elucidates, Black people’s experience as citizens in America is far different from White people’s. Rankine explores overwhelming, egregious instances of Black maltreatment, as well as seemingly innocuous instances their mistreatment, to convey how the differences Black people in America experience permeate and affect their existence.
Rankine does not give a holistic depiction of Black lives in contemporary American society, nor does she give historical context as to why this discrimination happened the way it did. She does not rationalize or attempt to explain why any of the injustices occur, she simply gives perspective. Citizen challenges the idea of what it means to be a citizen by enabling the reader to feel what it means to be discreetly ostracized at every turn in mundane, daily life. With her informal, visceral writing style, Rankine impeccably demonstrates racially-rooted prejudice, aiding the reader to understand what it might be like to experience the reality she portrays. By interspersing the text with thought-inspiring, cryptically figurative sections, the author illustrates the actual experience of a cold, desolate America many Black people experience; “All day blue burrows the atmosphere … You give yourself back until nothing’s left but the dissolving blues of metaphor,” writes Rankine (70).
Instead of explaining how horrific the injustice of America is, she guides the reader to understand viscerally, letting him/her come to the realization themselves, as contemplation of the emotionally charged metaphors and images scattered throughout Citizen manifests in a better understanding of racial discrimination.
Citizen Response
William Blastos
Literary Borders
4 / 21 / 19
How does Citizen as a text query and challenge the idea of what it means to be a “citizen”?
Claudia Rankine explores the nuances of being a citizen of American society from a black perspective in her experimental text, Citizen. Perhaps my whiteness is what made this text so illuminating, but the manner in which Rankine portrays the everyday interactions with colleagues, friends, and strangers highlights how in the smallest of ways white people continue to consistently place people of color lower than themselves. Her short form description of these everyday interactions imbues a sense repetition and normalcy on the reader, regarding these small, implicitly racist interactions that black people are consistently subject to. In this way Rankine is able to show the reader that these interactions are not atypical in our society, and they often come from the places where one might least expect them to. Her source material for these short descriptions comes more from friends and colleagues than from strangers on the street. And so, Citizen challenges the idea of racism as something that some people are and others aren’t, instead it makes the case that racism is a force in our society that is inherent in every white person. One cannot say “I am not racist” because we are all parts of an inherently racist society, and so everyone must confront how they, both consciously and unconsciously, perpetuate the racist parts of American society. We are all citizens of American society, and have all at some point contributed to the culture of racism within it, and through her portrayal of the black experience within American society, Rankine shows that citizenship is often a privilege not guaranteed for people of color.
By this I mean that the everyday interactions that I as a white person engage in do not actively lower my social status. For Rankine, and nearly everyone else of color in the US, simple trips to the store or ordering food at a restaurant are reminders of the ways society privileges white people. On page 15 Rankine discusses a man having the police called on him for walking outside of the house where he was babysitting and talking on the phone. Something that would not cause anyone to bat an eye if he were white, is suddenly so threatening that law enforcement must be involved. This example and others like it showcase how actions that white people would take without a second thought, become threatening as a result of one’s race. This illustrates the ways in which white people are granted citizenship in that their intentions are not questioned. People of color are consistently forced to clarify and subject themselves to verification and query about the smallest aspects of everyday life from talking on the phone to ordering food. In showing these instances, Rankine comments on the privilege of citizenship, and how in almost every way, the right to be an unquestioned citizen in American society is exclusive to white people.
Cecilia Needham
April 22, 2019
Citizen Response
To be a citizen is to be a member of one’s society with an active participation and representation in government, defined by the act of living in one’s nation. In her novel Citizen, Claudia Rankine writes about the alarming disparity between what it means to be a citizen for white people versus for people of color. Because blackness is defined by the overwhelming whiteness of the dominating American culture, black people are stripped of many of the aforementioned privileges of a citizen. To be a black United States citizen means something entirely different than being a white United States citizen, as their experiences are drastically disparate, which Rankine show her readers though many examples in her avant-garde book.
A particularly illuminating quote Rankine includes in Citizen is “Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background’” (25). She then goes on to describe related art that she includes on pages 52 and 53, “This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies” (25). This is one of the many examples that the lives of black people in America are defined and negatively affected by the dominating whiteness in popular culture and governing bodies. Thus, what it means to be a black citizen is completely negatively redefined by no agency of their own.
Being a black American is defined by whiteness and dramatically different than what it means to be a white citizen, an experience that fits the more traditional definition of citizenship. This is further demonstrated when the “you” Rankine writes to on July 13, 2013 is listening to the radio repeat Trayvon Martin’s name, “You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans. // Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on” (151). Here, black life is again affected by white racist intentions. Then, Rankine speaks of how to be a citizen as a person of color; not by participating in society but by being complacent to the suffering it enacts on you. Citizen is a overt challenge to traditional notions of citizenship as it illustrates the stark contrast of experiences in the United States due to race, demonstrating that being a citizen means something completely different to black and white Americans as the former is defined by the latter.
Joe
Professor Cassarino
Lit Borders
4/21/19
Citizen Response
I had an interesting experience reading this book. At first, I struggled with comprehending the writing style and was trying to analyze it more than I should have. It was challenging for me to see the art of the work because I was too focused on trying to understand every line. I was about half way through and decided to take a break and snag an ice cream cone with my good friend Augie. I then shared my challenges reading this book and Augie gave me some great advice which allowed me to take more from Citizen than I otherwise would have. He told me to do less analyzation and instead to read the novel the same way I would look at a painting. To take it in for the piece of art that it is and see how it moves me. I took the advice he gave me and ended up enjoying and taking more out of the second half of the book than I did the first.
In her novel, Citizen, Claudia Rankine examines the ways in which black people are mistreated by white society all around the globe. She powerfully displays several moments where this society has acted in discriminatory fashion towards people of color. Through her many depictions of said events, Rankine challenges the idea of what being a citizen means. Merriam Webster defines a citizen as an individual who is “an Inhabitant of a city or town especially: one entitled to the rights and privileges of a free man.” The last sentence of this definition is what interests me. Throughout history, the people who define said “rights and privileges” for citizens of free states have been white. Until recently (the past one hundred years) Black people, especially in the United States, would not have fit the category of how Merriam Webster defines a citizen. This relatively recent “acceptance” of black people into white society has been a challenging and troubling transition where, as Claudia Rankine describes, many individuals of color have faced experiences of prejudice. To sum it all up, Rankine challenges what it means to be a “citizen” by revealing moments where black people’s “rights and privileges” have been attacked. She makes the reader think about the way they have been treated and challenges them to look beyond themselves and into the lives of individuals who have faced difficulties with their core rights.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a citizen is first and foremost “a person considered in terms of their […] fulfilment of the duties and responsibilities of a member of society.” To pertain to a community is to ascribe to the expectations both written and unspoken about what the self must be in order to belong; in exchange, we are granted rights, privileges, and access to commonwealth. In her 2014 book Citizen, Claudia Rankine argues that citizenship for the black body is transient and ever dependent on the white gaze and approval. She questions not only if there can be true black citizenship when it is “the White Man who creates the black” (128), but if there can even be an invention of America where the black is visible, participant, and not merely adjacent.
As she explores themes of visibility, participation and conformity, Rankine evokes the idea that can be no understanding of blackness that is not tied to a contrasting “sharp white” America (31). After all, to be visible requires one to notice, to perceive, and to acknowledge. The act of seeing is not passive, but it is a deliberate exercise of empathy and affirmation. The liminality of denying and bearing witness to the black body is a political manifestation, one in which the white gaze either renders the black experience null or categorizes it as a threat to themselves. Rankine’s juxtaposition of anecdotes narrating moments of microaggressions and situations of great violence and injustice gives shape to this void. It forces the readers to reckon that there is no inconsequence, no well-meaning “Oh my God, I didn’t see you” (77), no action however small that does not implicate that racism “doesn’t have an ending” (159). It contends that there can be no citizenship when conforming to the structures of the oppressor mean “feeling you don’t belong so much to you” (144). Indeed, in Citizen, Rankine echoes Malcom X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” and proposes that the black individual is not made a citizen “because [they’re] an American” (Breitman 4), but instead because of the kinship they have to each other for resisting those who do not see them.
In her book Citizen, Claudia Rankine questions what it means to be an America citizen, and wonders if African Americans actually hold that status in American society when they’ve been, and continue to be, silenced, made invisible, and forgotten.
Claudia Rankine describes the pressure that black Americans are under to be silent. The pressure to”confront injustice without making a scene” (35), to not be seen as “insane” (30). To not let the “umpire look down from her high chair as if regarding an unreasonable child, a small animal” (65). Every response to injustice seems to fill a narrative, seems to fit nicely into the “marketable” (23) black anger, the “performance of blackness” (23). The only thing left to do is to somehow not react, to somehow move on, to “learn not to absorb the world” (48). To not “speak unless you are spoken to” (131).
Can someone truly be a citizen if they’re invisible, completely forgotten in society? Rankine uses numerous moments throughout Citizen to reveal the experience of being an invisible and forgotten citizen. Her examples of invisibility grow in scale, from micro-aggressions to overt racism and hate crimes, revealing how racism, in all its forms, is deeply woven into American society. For example, the book begins with someone the narrator considered extremely close to her confusing her with another. It’s not just her individuality that’s invisible, but her literal body. Rankine describes what feels like her body’s inability to claim space for itself. On the train, she keeps trying to fill the space, but she feels threatened to do so, knowing “the space belongs to the body” of the man next to her. Another example of her invisibility is the man that cuts her in line, who is “truly surprised” (77) to see her. He wasn’t in a hurry, he insists, he really, really just didn’t see her. These people, made invisible in society, are subsequently quickly forgotten. In the portion on Hurricane Katrina, she lifts quotes from the victims who are realizing, shocked, that they were “forgotten” (84). Their faces are obscured, no one seems to see them. The water seemed to have taught a lesson: them that “no one would come” (85), that they truly were invisible. And most of all, the modification of the famous public lynching photo from 1930 (page 91)drives this invisibility home. The victims are obscured in blackness. They’re completely gone from the narrative. The lynchers however, are still pointing and smirking. It doesn’t matter if the victims are there or not: they’ve always been invisible to the lynchers. Like the hate crime victim James Craig Anderson, to they lynchers, the victims were just “black object[s]” (93), part of a general blackness, with no individuality or citizenship.
Madison Middleton
April 20, 2019
Citizen Response
In her 2015 The Guardian interview, Cynthia Rankine asks herself the question, “How is [citizenship] embodied and honoured?” Her book Citizen often explores literal bodies, specifically those of colour. Rankine studies the maltreatment of renowned tennis player Serena Williams to explore her question. In a traditionally white environment like a tennis court, Williams’ blackness stands out. With the influence of racism, referees make questionable or false calls at the detriment of Williams. When she strikes back, she’s punished severely. To grapple with this injustice, Rankine postulates, “[I]t could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief — code for being black in America — is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context — randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you” (30). In her Guardian interview, Rankine references the murder of Michael Brown, stating that “Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked ‘like a demon’… Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.” She brings up racial imagination in both her comment about Williams and Brown. It is not the human themself who is judged, but the body. In both situations, whether a tennis match or fatal shooting, the victim participates, or does not participate, on an uneven playing field. The rules cease to apply.
Rankine illuminates this paradox in order to question the concept of citizenship. Oxford Dictionary defines the word “citizen” as “a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized.” Rankine challenges this definition in two ways. First, by illustrating that black people are governed under different rules than white people, she pushes against the legality of citizenship. In theory, a country’s laws distribute evenly and affect all citizens equally. Rankine shows that this is not the case for people of colour. In some instances, people of colour are barely considered human at all. Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown “because he looked ‘like a demon.’” In Wilson’s mind, Brown was not a person. In one of her New Yorker articles, Rankine stated, “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.” Brown was killed because the imagination of a white person decided that he was other, and thus undeserving of life. Rankine illustrates that the rules of citizenship, and sometimes humanity, do not apply to black people in the United States.
The second way she challenges the definition of citizenship is through the idea of being “naturalized.” Throughout Citizen she refers to the ocean and the colour blue, perhaps alluding to the Atlantic Ocean that carried slave ships from Africa to the United States. She hits this point home by ending her book with Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, specifically focusing on the dark-skinned leg of a slave protruding from the ocean while bloody-jawed fish obscure the rest of their body. Rankine hones in on the paradox of naturalism. The people carried on the slave ships were brought to the United States not as intended citizens but as objects. Through her work, Rankine asks if this status has changed. In her Guardian interview, she mentions the Clinton correctional facility guards who called a black inmate a “non-compliant” body. She says, “He is non-compliant because he is dead.” Whether or not the prisoner was literally dead, Rankine highlights the guards referring to a human body as an object, something to be punished, in addition to the idea that they never considered the prisoner to be alive in the first place. Rankine evokes that leg in the ocean, of a person being tossed overboard to feed the fish. Maybe they were disobedient or no longer served a purpose in the mind of a white person. She illuminates the objectification of the black body and asks if an objectified body can ever be considered an equal citizen. Despite this daunting question, she also provides hope: “This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful” (128). She pushes the definition of “citizenship” to mean something more than a legal term, but to be treated like a human.