More than just a book, Citizen is a piece of art/a lyrical tribute to Black Americans and all that isn’t shouted about on a daily basis; microaggression and casual racism.
The epitome of the American lyric, a hood (empty) graces the front cover, representing the fear that people feel, wholly unfounded, towards black youth.
A representation of stereotyping, oppression, and systemic racism, as we read on, Rankine’s words fill the emptiness of the hood with the experiences of Americans whose color has rendered them invisible to the many who are privileged enough to be blind.
Page 148: ‘When the waitress hands your friend the card she took from you, you laugh and ask what else her privilege gets her? Oh, my perfect life, she answers. Then you both are laughing so hard, everyone in the restaurant smiles.’
As Rankine notes in an interview with the American literary magazine, TriQuarterly (Schwartz, C. 2015), ‘During protests, you have white people saying, “How can I help you?” And when I hear this, I think, “Why isn’t it about a national failure? Why isn’t it an injustice for you as well as for me? Why don’t you want to help yourself as a citizen, a participant in this democracy?’
Experimental and defying genres, Citizen is a combination of text, verse, and prose with images and photography scattered throughout. Where the critical text gets us to think about society and its role in upholding racism, the poetry gets us to think about ourselves and the role that we play (are we the micro aggressors?) particularly since the book is narrated entirely in second person.
You are not sick, you are injured. You* ache for the rest of life (page 143).
*The ‘you’ is Rankine, but the ‘you’ is also all black people, past and present, and the reader, and any citizen who lives in our racist world (including Donovan Harris, Charles Kelly, Frankie Porter, and Richard Roderick, the four black men whom Citizen is credited as being for) …
‘And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description’ (page 105).
Harris, Kelly, Porter, and Rederick went on a robbing spree in 1991 when they were just teenagers after stealing from a string of restaurants. Their sentences, however, were extremely disproportionate to their crimes. Despite no one being so much as injured during the robberies, Porter was sentenced to an unfathomable 500+ years in prison (Warner, S. 2011).
Now, considering how statistics highlight that one in five black men born in 2001 are likely to experience imprisonment within their lifetime (Ghandnoosh, N. 2023), we can see that racism was undoubtedly the judge at Porter’s trial…
‘Look closely’, Rankine tells us. ‘This is what this nanosecond of racism is like, this is how this nanosecond of racism feels.’
White privilege and failed judicial systems and stereotyping, ‘What do you see in me that you wish to suffocate?’
Racist comments and ‘jokes’ and judgement, ‘What about my being unsettles you? What is it about this figure that says ‘threat?’
To encourage a national dialogue surrounding such topics, Johari Osayi Idusuyi, a twenty-year-old student and writer from the US made the tabloids when, in 2015 at a Trump rally, she got out a copy of Citizen, its cover facing the cameras, ‘speaking truth to Power’, and began reading.
Upon speaking about the viral moment afterward, Idusuyi explained that she had attended the rally intending to take an unbiased stance. When protestors were treated disrespectfully, however, (a man snatched a protester’s hat with such force that her hair went with it, for example), and bullying tactics were used, she disengaged from Trump’s speech, and that’s when she picked up Citizen.
‘I’m in the middle, I’m on camera, so why not use the opportunity to promote a great book?’, Idusuyi said (Poetry Foundation, 2015).
And why was Idusuyi in the middle and on camera? Because of her race. A token gesture that backfired, she was allocated a complimentary VIP seat solely because she was a minority in a room with an overwhelming lack of diversity…
Although Citizen is based on Rankine’s experiences as a black woman, regardless of our race, we can still feel the pain of not belonging through the pages. Why? Because Citizen, as per the James Baldwin quote included in the book, ‘lays bare the questions hidden by the answers’ (page 115). Questions such as…
How is racism embedded in everyday life?
The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work. If this is his routine, he didn’t use it on the friend who went before you…
&
How do we address bigotry when society refuses to acknowledge it?
The woman with the multiple degrees says, ‘I didn’t know black women could get cancer.’
The fact is that microaggressions, all the subtle ways that racism plays out in society, add up to become macro aggressions, where what we see we believe.
Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people, but everything to do with unrealistic stereotypes, hence why so many black men die at the hands of white men who ‘can’t police their imagination’ (page 135).
Holding up a mirror to systemic racism, ‘I do not always feel colored. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background’ (page 25), Citizen is activism through the lens of literature, arguably the most important piece of literature that you will ever read.
‘The book of a generation’ (Sunday Times).
Portfolio of Hope 