Thoughts on Citizen
Reading Citizen as a work of protest noticeably emphasizes some of the hidden elements which relate to racism in the work, such as on page 77. The line cutting incident was very cleverly placed in this book. If I had read the incident by itself, I would not have picked up on the line cutter’s dialogue as being racist. Since there is no description of either person at the checkout, it sounded very much like typical line cutting accident at any grocery store. In context of the book, I can see how this relates to the protest, and how this could be a nasty remark, especially under certain circumstances. If I read this work as poetry I think, I could easily missed a lot of things hidden within text.
I thought Rankine did wonderful job
introducing me to the protest against racism which takes forms in looks,
speech, and implied judgments. Before I
read the Citizen, I was not fully aware of what she was protesting, but I am
glad I didn’t know. She makes her points quite blatant.
The images and art in the book
either made a lot of sense to me or they didn’t at all. The picture which bewildered me the
most was the young caribou taxidermy photo.
How does a Malibu with a human face on it relate to the protest? The image on page 147 also perplexed me. I could see the silhouette of a boy in the
picture, but beyond that how does this relate to the protest? The picture on page 96-97 puzzled me at first
until I realized the purpose of the frames.
It probably represents segregation, with the people of different ethnicity
separated by the two frames. Photography
being one of my hobbies, my favorite visual was the world cup pictures. The
filmstrip pictures, on pages 122-126, do a great job showing the progression of the act of discrimination during the world cup.
I agree, the cutting the line poem was one that really stood out to me compared to other readings in the book. When we ignore racism, it becomes a problem. This book did a great job of laying out all issues and stereotypes of racism, class, and prejudices that we currently have in the United States. I agree with you I think that Citizen by Claudia Rankine did a wonderful job of highlighting the racist judgments that we surpass onto others. Even though we supposedly live in a “post-racial” United States, have we really come as far as we think? Innocent black men are still getting shot by police; and African-Americans have a much higher percentage of poverty than whites. I also like what you mentioned about the art in the book, her paintings and different classical multimedia artwork along with her poetry and monologue really tied the whole book together and made it really unique and visually interesting and also made it such a great read. I agree as well with how you said this book opened your eyes to racism protest, I think that especially in the year of 2016 when citizens are calling for police reform its important that we pay attention to racism protest, for example Black Lives Matter. So that’s awesome that you are interested in racism protest!
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