Analysis Of Citizen : An American Lyric

The neighbor calls this friend “a menacing black guy,” not “that nice young man.” Then, he proceeds to tell Rankine that he has called the police (Rankine 15). Once again, in the book, a black person is portrayed as an animal, as he seems like a threat. Due to the neighbor believing that the friend was a “menacing” man, rather than the “nice young man,” he implies that he thinks that all black people look the same. This also connects to the ideology that “black people are animals,” as most people cannot tell the difference between each animal from the same species. In addition, the neighbor’s rapid progression towards the calling of law enforcement is shocking. Before even calling Rankine, he immediately phones the police, signifying racial profiling. If the friend were white, the neighbor would have taken other actions before calling the police, such as calling Rankine or even asking the friend what he is doing. Through the two situations, the reader can understand that Rankine’s view of a citizen is one in which there is no discrimination between races; all races receiving equal treatment.

Citizen, written by Claudia Rankine in 2014, narrates testimonies of systematic racism and every day micro aggressions through poems, essays, scripts and images. Rankine documents the racist encounters through the second person point of view for the reader to feel and understand the effects racism has on the body and mind. This paper will examine hypervisibility and invisibility of the black body embedded in the novel because of decades of racism. Rankine emphasizes the sensory emotions and feelings of the black body as a response to America’s reluctance to recognize and empathize with black men and women.

In Citizen: An American Lyric written by Claudia Rankine, there is a passage where a man is stopped because he fits the description of a “criminal”. The speaker faces immense trauma just trying to relay to the officer that he is not the perpetrator they are looking for. In fact he is just another person trying to get home from a long day at the office. The officers refuse to listen which angers the victim and causes him to curse at the officer saying, “Go ahead hit me motherfucker.” (Rankine 107) While the victim could not have been held for the original reason, he was now charged with speeding. The victim was then taken down to the station on new charges. After being wrongfully targeted, held, fingerprinted, and stripped, he was finally let

Rankine divided her lyric into seven sections. Although each section focused on different topics they were connected by an underlying theme, racism. The first section focused on incidents of microaggression. Strategically Rankine begins to display incidents that stem from childhood, drawing a clear line that skin color causes children to be treated

Lawrence Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes, is a work of historical fiction. Hill writes from the view of a pre-Abolition slave narrator. As his first-person narrator, Aminata Diallo, challenges much racism. She tells the story of how her life takes a massive turn at the age of eleven, and narrates her experience of migration in the United States, Sierra Leone, Canada, and finally Great Britain. According to the article ‘The Slave Narrative Tradition in Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes’ critics have appreciated Hill’s use of the popular slave narrative form. This novel has won many awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a CBC Radio Canada Reads win, since its publication in 2007. Although, critics have been slower to acknowledge The Book of Negroes as an important revisionist work that clings to and undermines a genre.

This past Friday, I attended Claudia Rankine’s reading at Fordham University Lincoln Center. Going into the reading I had no real idea of what was going to be discussed nor the true significance of her work, all I knew is that she is an important and worldly renowned poet. In the reading, she read excerpts from her book named Citizen “An American Lyric.” Which focuses on micro aggressions towards people of color. These events are examples of everyday racism that can be experienced by people of color in the US. Though I have read some of her work in the past, attending this reading and actually hearing the author express her work through her own emotions really took things to another level. It showed me a whole knew understanding of what I

Called a “devastating book that everyone should read” by David Mason, Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen is in fact a book of poems, but subtitled as an American Lyric. According to Mason, Citizen is “is an education in the micro and macro aggressions so often defining American race relations.” (Mason) Rankine expresses her concern for the safety and wellbeing of the Black race today, and feels the need to let the readers know how awfully suppressed they are, no matter where they are. Including in Citizen

The main character recounts events of horrific injustice, racism and prejudice throughout the novel. While still living with her abusive father, the main character travels with her African American maid, Rosaleen, to claim her right to vote under the recently passed Voting Rights Act. On their way to the administration building, they are stopped by three white men, all repelled by the idea that she has the right to vote. Rosaleen, enraged by these men’s flawed ideologies and racist remarks spills tobacco spit onto one man’s shoes. Rosaleen is then beaten by the men, picked up by the police, and then hit again in front of the police, resulting in no punishment for the man who assaulted Rosaleen (Kidd). This, in addition to many other examples of similar degree, display the injustices and racism faced by the African American community during the 1960’s and the reasons racism should be fought against and looked down upon for the horrific beast that it is. In addition to this, the main character also helps to express the themes of not judging a book by it’s cover, through the main character’s self revelations. Once staying with the family for a short time and meeting their friend Zach, the main character, Lily, realizes that she has held a prejudice against the African American community due to her upbringing. She learns not to judge others by their skin color, because she finds the family is more

America and race were two themes strung through the week’s readings. It might be especially interesting to note when the two are woven tightly together, like in “Learning to love America” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and “I, Too” by Langston Hughes.

Much of American Literature written in the 1900’s detail the experiences of race within America, being that slavery had only recently been abolished. Society in no way viewed African American’s as equal to white American’s. At this time, blacks were forced to fight to be viewed as a full person, worthy of basic human rights. Nella Larson’s Passing, and Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman, both call attention to the racial tensions in a post Civil War America, by exposing the manipulation of the endemic racism within our culture, and the effect that it has on the way the African American community interacts within itself through the use of an extended metaphor.

The introductory line of Harriet Jacob’s preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”, is short yet serving (Jacobs 224). Although brief in its nature, this statement manages to encompass two major aspects that characterize African-American literature: audience and truth. In all writing, understanding the target audience and how to arrange an argument or essay to appeal to that specific crowd is paramount. However, it is especially important for African-American authors, who typically need to expose injustices or call for social change in their works. In particular, two African-American authors who understood their audience and how to manipulate that understanding were Charles W. Chesnutt and Marcus Garvey. Although they were born only twenty-nine years apart, Chesnutt and Garvey technically wrote for different time periods. While Chesnutt’s work is associated with “Literature of the Reconstruction”, Garvey was grouped with authors and activists from the Harlem Renaissance (Gates and Smith 580 ). The separation of their literary epochs drove Chesnutt and Garvey to write for contradistinctive audiences that demanded unique written techniques and rhetorical strategies, but that both asked for utmost honesty.

The works in the anthology focus on a major point in America’s history of equality based on race and ethnicity. Writers such as W.E.B Dubois and Wendy Ross focus on this issue. Each of their writings focus on the issue of inequality because of the color of their skin. Ross proves through her poem “If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You” that because she is brown she does not receive the same treatment and rights as she would if she had been born with lighter skin. This was a major issue in American history and it shaped the society that America is today. Works such as Dubois, Ross, Faulkner and many other writers during this time in American history are important today to help people today understand the things that people faced in history.

While Americanah is considered a novel by most literary assessment standards, I would suggest that it is perhaps a unique reference manual, a commentary on the complex codes and various ways that we have developed when talking about race in the United States. These complex codes, as presented by Adiche, is the notion that will propel the following road map for this essay. I will begin by examining Ifemelu’s initial landing and introduction to the United States, followed by a sense of depression which ensued post her various life disappointments. Then we will take a peek at a few racial identifiers, not originally known to Ifemelu, that exist to categorize people in the US, with a slight focus on the role that hair plays in Americanah. Finally, we will examine the ways that Ifemelu is compelled to voice her unique perspective via blogging and her compulsion to spread her insights to the world. Ultimately, it will be my mission to analyze Americanah, and the unique insights it gives us in regards to race through an outsider’s perspective, to conclude that it is a crucial text for better understanding race in America. Ultimately supporting our guiding question that Americanah is an essential text for an African-American studies class. For the sake of length and effectiveness, I will omit the themes of romantic love and other various major perspectives found within the book, such as Obinze’s, and just focus on Ifemelu’s experiences with race. Let us begin by examining why an

The issue of race has pushed Americas’ ethnicities apart. William Faulkner has shown the pain that this divide has caused to the people. In stories like “A Rose for Emily,” “Barn Burning,” “Dry September,” “That Evening Sun,” “The Bear,” “Shingles for the Lord,” “The Tall Men,” and “Red Leaves,” Faulkner reveals how the South saw the world during his lifetime. Faulkner writes about the world he sees around him and now it shows his new readers how badly their ancestors treated one another. Faulkner shows racism through his wording, characters, and actions in his stories.

The purpose of this assignment was to reflect on the poem Song of a Citizen using critical analysis to understand the complete meaning of what Milosz has written within the text. The poem Song of a Citizen is an illuminating reflection on the abominable conditions of the Jewish people and the suffering they have endured wrapped into a piece on how a prisoner is separated from the natural world, connected by Milosz’s incredible writing ability.