Given current events, like many Americans, I’m making an effort to read more on race, racism, and racial relations. I know reading a book isn’t going to make society better by itself, but the simple reading of ideas can perhaps help me to be a better person.
To that end, I read Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric.
Rankine is a poet by profession, so her book isn’t a the same sort of book I’ve been reading on the subject this past summer. Rather than write a sobering book of ideas, Rankine instead wrote a poem that acted as a sobering book of sensations. Written in the form of a long, lyric poem, the book mixed ideas and images to create an impression of the ways racism hits black people in America and beyond.
Most interesting is, while Rankine mentions many incidents both large and small plus well-known incidents of racist behavior and smaller, more personal micro-aggressive incidents, Rankine may have been through many of these incidents herself. And, to make it more relevant to the reader, much of the book is written in the second person. This isn’t an account of Rankine saying “I did this with a friend and…” but “you did this with a friend…” allowing the reader to step into the shoes of the speaker.
And many times, especially in the first section that is composed entirely of short, quick examples of racism, the perpetrator is a “friend”. Presumably, the point is even people who mean well and aren’t trying to do harm, by virtue of a general obliviousness that many white people may enjoy, can still say and do hurtful things without realizing it.
Given the nature of the work, I’m not sure what else to say about it. It’s food for thought in verse form, finding a unique way to express ideas we should probably all be aware of.
Grade: A
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