Citizen, Discussion Post 1

Citizen by Claudia Rankine was not a pleasant read. It made me think about things that I do not like thinking about because they make me feel sad and uncomfortable. Due to my own visceral emotional response, it is fair to believe that the text was highly effective as a work of art, although I am having a hard time understanding Citizen as a work of protest. The text required a bit of extra work from the reader to fully digest what was happening, especially in Chapter 5, where there is not any kind of exposition set for the reader to fully grasp what is going on.

The last time I remember feeling the same kind of confused and uncomfortable was while reading a specific part of Toni Morrison’s Beloved for a Women’s Lit. class in high school where the same kind of stream of consciousness writing is used to describe what my teacher suggested might be a description of being on a ship filled with other slaves. Maybe Citizen is a little bit more powerful when contextualized with the work of other Black authors because the expectation of something horrible to happen is almost inherent. I remember the panic of immediately putting down The Color Purple by Alice Walker when I was a teenager because a rape happens literally in the first page of the book. It is telling if the first state of mind when reading a book about Black American experiences is to brace oneself in the anticipation of icky overwhelming feelings.

There are a few things that set Claudia Rankine’s work apart from that of other Black authors. First of all, the book feels really, really contemporary. Even if the readers were to ignore the fact that the book serves as an anthology of recent racial injustices or aggressions towards Black Americans, one could argue that the style of the book is extremely contemporary because of its dense content presented in fast-paced and short packages. Another trait is Rankine’s use of documentation. Citizen can serve as documentation for highly specific examples of racism in which the aggressors are unaware. There is also a more direct form of documentation with the inclusion of the artwork and other images that tie the book to real present life. One way to interpret this move is that it reinforces her experiences and her re-telling of events when she points out that she does not stand alone in the sentiment of White oblivion to Black plight. One trait that Citizen is missing that, surprisingly, might even weaken Rankine’s point of view is the focus on the topic of slavery. She instead focuses on current events about Black struggle without framing it in its history. That almost makes it more real because it can be easy to try and distance present-day Americans from slavery because Citizen would then create a comparison between the treatment of present-day Black Americans and the treatment of the enslaved people in their lineage. Although no one owns Black people anymore, Black Americans still deal with the repercussions of that history. The readers are able to get a more sober understanding of present-day racism when Rankine focuses mostly on the present day.