Claudia Rankine uses strong imagery
and powerful historical events to conjure up an emotional response from
her reader in order, as she says in the final sentence of her book, to teach a
"lesson" (location 738).
After reading this Citizen my mind was a bit puzzled
for there was a lot to take in: from the beautiful imagery she uses to convey
her ideas, her "if you were in their shoes" style of writing, to her
use of historical events from Jim Crow Laws to Trayvon Martin’s murder,
connecting all the pieces together took some work.
But I think that is the point. So many times as humans we
look away to the events that go on around us; often we say that race is dead,
that the idea of “racism” has been replaced with “stereotypes” and do not connect
the dots ourselves to see that color does matter, that “stereotypes” is just a
way to sugar coat this society’s intolerable acts. But in this society the
actions of one is the actions of many, as Rankine puts it, “It is the White man
who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates,” (location
610). It is the power of mass media, their influence, the people who control
it, that create what we see. That is at least my initial response to this text.
How does this literature act as an embodiment of protest? I
don’t know if it works all that well. I feel as though it aims to build
awareness, and as I said before, connect the dots for the reader with
historical events so to begin a movement, not so much win one; maybe it at
least helps as a work of support for those who are looking for evidence that
can’t find it. If your idea of a “protest” coincides with your idea of “awareness”
then it’s goal as a piece of protest works exceptionality well.
Think about the other readings we have read in class so far,
especially the Peeples article that we read and discussed last week. You know
from the very beginning the view that the author takes on. It gives you premise
upon premise, idea upon idea, to achieve its goal. It is blunt and
straightforward, either you get it or you don’t, and that’s what makes it a
good work of protest (unless of course, it ends up being confusing). It has its
evidence and it tells you how you should interpret the evidence, and you will
always come to the conclusion they want you to.
Rankine does something different. She leaves it up to the
reader to put everything together. Her use of specific historical events is
simply a mentioning of names, sometimes a quick summary of occasions, but never
does she tell you how you should feel about the puzzle pieces she gives you.
She allows her writing to trigger an emotional response; she wants to make you
want to look up the names she mentions and do the research yourself so that
when you finish looking up all her references you will at some point come to
the same conclusion that she has already come to. That is the beauty behind Citizen, the reason why it is so easy to
read and why her words are so powerful. In this respect, it is not logic that
drives the reader to understand, but the emotion that helps guide the reader to
a conclusion.
*Location is used instead of page number because of the source of which I read the book from, in this case it was in an ebook format.
After reading your response to “Citizen”, by Claudia Rankine, I have to say that I agree with you on a number of points. The main point, the one mentioned in your first paragraphs, is that “connecting all the pieces together took some work”. There were many times, for example when she was talking about one topic and then switched to a different set (talking about sports sometimes, and shootings other times). I, also, felt as if that most of the reasoning behind this was to show that racism still exists. It’s one thing to talk about late night shooting, something you or I may have had nothing to do with. However, when talking about simple things such as mixing up names or “misunderstandings” (like the story about the friend on his phone), it is important to note that these can happen daily, often without the offenders even noticing. Do we engage in any of these “stereotypes”? Is there anything wrong with these stereotypes? Also, why are we so quick to accept “stereotypes”? Maybe it’s because we don’t want to be known about racist, but maybe we have preconceived notions of what whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians etc. are and how they “should act”.
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