Susan Rankine 's Citizen : An American Lyric

In Nate’s Marshall’s poetry collection Wild Hundreds, Marshall talks about the meaning of being a black person in America and the systemic oppression faced on a daily basis. He discusses issues such as police brutality, the criminalization of black people, the school to prison pipeline, the push out of black students in the educational system, systems preventing black people from succeeding, stereotypes of black people, the country’s lack of accountability in murdering black people, etc. His poetry also revolves heavily around the community he grew up in which is located in the Southside of Chicago. Marshall uses his revolutionary poetry to highlight the power and success in his community. Marshall discusses how this country kills black people for being

In society there is a lot of misconception of the term racism. According to the merriam-webster dictionary members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of others race which many people would agree with. What is racism? The normal person if asked will simply reply, not liking someone for their color of their skin. Racism from my attitude which is substantiated by historically events is a system of power .Thus is a system of power i.e. to control the world and its people. Employed by Europeans to subjugate and discriminate against other groups, in particular Africans/black people. Racism is a power which ran thru a systemic way to hinder and sabotage other groups. The system is so elaborate that it almost seems nonexistence

American history is fraught with racism. Its evolution is depicted in literature through the ages, from journal entries of colonial slavery to novels about modern-day race relations. Countee Cullen was a black poet alive during the Harlem Renaissance whose poems “Tableau” and “Incident” portray racism as it was in the early 20th century. Through the use of figurative language and tone, Cullen develops in each poem themes about the effects of small actions.

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

In the new proactive book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander dives into the not so complicated racial issues that plague this country that we tend to ignore. In all of history, African Americans have had to constantly fight for their freedoms and the right to be considered a human being in this society. It’s very troubling looking back and seeing where we have failed people in this country. At the turn of the century, when people began to think that we had left our old ways behind, this book reminds us that we are wrong. Racism is still alive today in every way, just in different forms.

This theme helps illuminate how black people came to be treated in America both when slavery existed and beyond into today’s society. The theme that black people are disposable bodies within American society. Because of the tradition of treating black people as objects or whose value strictly came from their ability to make profit, the idea of what it means to be black in America is imbedded in the danger of losing one’s body. Although slavery has ended, the racism remains as a violence inflicted on black people’s bodies. Coates is more than happy to emphasize that racism is an instinctive practice.

The writing styles of Claudine Rankine and Colson Whitehead vary significantly, but both manage to address the issue of race in America in profound ways. In Citizen: An American Lyric, the former utilizes a combination of images and poetry to convey a sense of open-endedness, while the latter follows a traditional historical fiction narrative in his novel, The Underground Railroad. The books build on historical and modern events to evoke emotion and convey criticism. *Rankine uses an experimental style to allow introspection, and Whitehead’s traditional writing blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction.

The misinterpretation of African Americans is very prominent in society. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen sheds light on the hyper-visibility of the African-Americans through stereotypes and invisibility of the Black body itself in an attempt to get readers to understand the inner conflicts of Black citizens. Citizen is composed of seven sections, which vary in length and content. The book is interspersed with photographs, sculpture, paintings, and other types of media. Rankine also draws from film and video, and various news media. Her descriptions of encounters between people of different races show how disconcerting words are and how they affect people. Though we often hear about deep-rooted institutional and cultural forces that contribute to racism, it appears that we less often hear about the psychological processes involved. Many would like to believe that racism is over, but society actions are a constant reminder of their true feeling about Blacks. Racial bias is prominent at all levels of the institution and it paralyzes the race as a whole. Rankine uses pronouns, anecdotes, and visual art to uncover the unconscious nature of racism and extend the conversation. The audience is both the eyewitness and the victim in this “post-racial” society that fails to teach us how to be a citizen. In allowing us, the readers and audience, to subject ourselves to this hurt, we experience, an understanding of true citizenship by identifying the wrongs and understanding the difference.

“Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”- C.S. Lewis

This Social-Self manifest in Citizen: An American Lyric, “A friend argues that Americans battle between the 'historical self' and the 'self self’.”' (Rankine 2014). Citizen helps the reader understand that the small everyday acts of racism can accumulate and potentially become toxic, this includes: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you. Written by poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine. Rankine discusses the microaggressions, which is defined as the

Claudia Rankine’s contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America’s biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. While she highlights a vast number of stories that illustrate the hate crimes that have occurred in the United States during the 21st century, the James Craig Anderson case is prevalent because his heartbreaking story is known by few individuals throughout the country. In 2011, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old man of Mississippi was nearly beaten to death by a group of white male teenagers due to the abundance of melanin in his skin. As if this was not enough, he was then purposely run over by a pickup truck as if he was just a random object in the road rather than an actual human being. These white young men stole the life away from Anderson, a devoted husband, and father similar to any other citizen of America simply because of him being black. While these Ku Klux Klan- reminiscent acts were thought to be “normal” in the 18th and 19th centuries, the 21st century is claimed to be the era of racial growth towards equality. Being that Anderson’s unjustifiable story was not nationally publicized further explains how the world seems immune to the racial injustice that is apparent today due to the cyclical nature of the occurrences. James Craig Anderson exemplifies how the world has yet to revolutionize, evidencing how we are still cemented in a racially insensitive epidemic. In other words, America is still racially insensitive to those who are seen as an inferior race, African Americans. `

Racism is the belief that one race is superior to another. Discrimination has been going on for generations among generations. Many years ago people of different races were divided from each other. Public places were segregated. Colored people had to use specific water fountains, schools were segregated, and blacks had to sit at the back of the buses. If they were to disobey then there would be consequences and repercussions. Equality was a figment of imagination, a dream the the minority groups had. Throughout the years racism has decreased and many things pertaining to racism were made illegal but that doesn’t mean racism disappeared. Although the separation of the races are more organized, racism can lead the world back to inequality,

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.

I have been pondering lately not just pondering more like drifting into a realm between earth and my self-conscious. An area in which I have been concealing conflicting ideas and debating ideas inside. One topics happened to be the topic of racism. Its origin, why it still breathes, can this beast ever be vanquished? I been wondering this for some time and I have seen radicals from both sides saying that it the “whites” fault and others saying it’s the “blacks and minorities” fault for the remaining existence for racism. I have come to the conclusion that both sides are inherently incorrect, we cannot just point fingers at each other and blame each other. The actual problem for this is the society we live in. It focuses on color too much. We