Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Citizen: An American Lyric, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy
Identity and Sense of Self
Anger and Emotional Processing
History and Erasure
Summary
Analysis
In a script for a “situation video,” readers are presented by a number of quotes from CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina and how people feel as they wait for help from national relief organizations. These organizations take an extremely long time to come to certain communities, leaving people wading through water. Under the strain of water, houses begin to lean and separate from themselves. Meanwhile, one speaker on CNN talks about the people who have been hit by this travesty, asking, “Have you seen their faces?” Another cobbled-together quote points out that the aftermath of this disaster reveals the significant disparities between rich people and poor people or between white people and black people. When somebody asks where FEMA or the other relief organizations are, another person answers by saying that she heard that the people who are supposed to help want to stay away.
It isn’t particularly clear what, exactly, a “situation video” is, though readers will perhaps have a better sense if they visit Claudia Rankine’s website, where there are a number of conceptual videos accompanied by the text in this section. More importantly, though, it’s worth considering Rankine’s interest in Hurricane Katrina, since the fact that relief organizations effectively left black communities to fend for themselves is a perfect illustration of the ways in which racial prejudice and implicit bias has worked its way into contemporary times, bringing themselves to bear on life or death situations.
Themes
In a quote from the CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a speaker says that he and his community members have been forgotten. Another person comments on the situation by talking about getting chills while looking at the people who have been influenced by the hurricane, emphasizing that they are extremely poor and “so black.” \
A noteworthy paradox emerges in this moment, as the black people affected by Hurricane Katrina become “hypervisible” but are also forgotten about. Indeed, the person who makes a point of noting that the people impacted by the hurricane are “so black” renders them “hypervisible,” focusing first and foremost on the color of their skin. And yet, the African American people dealing with the fallout of Hurricane Katrina still feel overlooked by society on the whole, having been left to fend for themselves. In this way, it becomes clear that visibility doesn’t necessarily lead to beneficial kinds of recognition. Rather, it often leads to little more than patronizing tokenization.
Themes
In a script for yet another “situation video”—this one entitled “In Memory of Trayvon Martin”—an unidentified speaker talks about how he and his brothers are “notorious.” Some of his brothers, he says, haven’t been to prison, but some have. He then notes that his brothers say his name on his birthday, adding, “They will never forget that we are named.” Later, he says that his brothers’ hearts are broken and that if he “knew another way to be,” he would call them and say, “My brother, dear brother, my dearest brothers, dear heart—.” Considering the sweep of history, the speaker then turns his attention to slavery and the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws that came after it, suggesting that these pieces of the past “accumulate” in his and his brothers’ lives.
It’s unclear who is speaking during this section, though it seems possible that the voice belongs to Trayvon Martin, a black teenager from Florida who was shot and killed by a member of a gated community’s neighborhood watch in 2012. Martin became an iconic figure in the aftermath of his death, which led to an outpouring of rage regarding hate crimes, racial profiling, and violence against the African American community. In this section, then, his (probable) voice emerges as one of unification, as he speaks about his “brothers.” Moreover, his observations about slavery and the Jim Crow era highlight the fact that contemporary racism has its roots in the United States’ history, which has easily made its way into the present.
Themes
The unnamed speaker of the “situation video” entitled “In Memory of Trayvon Martin” says that if he called his brothers, he would say farewell to them before actually saying goodbye. Going on, he suggests that he says goodbye to his brothers before they can even hang up the phone, saying, “I say good-bye before anyone can hang up, don’t hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes.” Following this script, there is a photograph called “Public Lynching,” which depicts a group of white people dressed in 1930s clothing. They are crowded around a tree. One man with a severe face looks at the camera and points up toward the tree branches, where there is only darkness.
This section dips into figuration and abstraction, but readers might intuit that the speaker (who is most likely Trayvon Martin himself) is referring to the fact that the incident that unfolded between Trayvon Martin and the neighborhood watchman who killed him was picked up in the background of several telephone calls that neighbors placed to the police. These snippets were recorded and used during the trial of the man who killed Martin. Consequently, these recordings document the last moments of Trayvon Martin’s life, meaning that they are “the call[s] of good-byes.” The picture included at the end of this “situation script” is also worth paying attention to, since it’s a famous photograph of a public lynching that took place in Indiana during the Jim Crow Era. What’s notable, though, is that this specific version of the picture has been altered. In the original picture, two black men hang from the tree. In this version, though, their bodies have been removed, and there is only darkness above. This speaks to the unfortunate erasure that often takes place in American society, as many people refuse to acknowledge the ways in which the country’s history of racism and violence has made its way into contemporary times.
Themes
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In yet another script for a “situation video”—this one called “In Memory of James Craig Anderson”—a speaker considers the trajectory of a particular pickup truck, suggesting that this truck is “a condition of darkness in motion.” This, the speaker says, means that the truck constructs a “dark subject,” but then another unidentified voice asks if the original speaker means to say a “black subject.” The first speaker then says, “No, a black object.” Next, the speaker describes the truck as it runs this “black object” into the ground, crushing its internal organs. Citing a recorded piece of audio, the speaker repeats an out-of-context line in which somebody says, “I ran that nigger over.”
Again, readers encounter another abstract and poetic section. There is, however, a simple event underpinning all of this figuration: the 2011 death of James Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black man who was intentionally run over by a young white man driving a pickup truck. This white man is the person whose voice appears in the snippet of audio the speaker references—a condemning piece of evidence. Once again, then, readers are faced with evidence of the overwhelming fact that racist violence is still very much a part of contemporary life.
Themes
Another script for a “situation video”—this one entitled “Jena Six”—appears, presenting readers with an account of an unidentified character walking into a school yard and sitting beneath a tree. The narrative then shifts to a group of boys approaching the tree that evening (after the other boy has left) and hanging a noose from its branches. As they tie the noose, they think that this experience is how they will “learn the ropes.” Next, the focus shifts to a high school party, where several boys beat another boy, smashing a beer bottle and throwing his body against a concrete floor as he bleeds out of his ears. The unidentified speaker then suggests that “boys will be boys,” especially as they try to figure out “the position of positioning,” which everyone knows is only a problem for “one kind of boy.”
This “situation video” references the Jena Six, a group of six African American high school students who were arrested in 2006 for severely beating a white boy at a party. This altercation was connected to an incident that took place at their school, when a black student and his friends decided to sit underneath a tree, under which only white students usually sat. That evening, a group of white boys strung up nooses on the tree. When the unidentified speaker says that “boys will be boys,” she echoes a phrase people often use to excuse otherwise unacceptable behavior. In this context, though, the boys who make up the Jena Six are in the process of figuring out how they fit into their surrounding circumstances, and though the white boy they hurt is presumably also trying to come to terms with his cultural positioning, the speaker indicates that the struggle to orient oneself in society is significantly more difficult for black boys attempting to make sense of their place in a racist world. And though this doesn’t necessarily excuse the Jena Six for resorting to violence, readers will perhaps sense that they are in the process of learning that outrage (and, indeed, violence) isn’t a productive way of responding to bigotry and injustice.
Themes
A new script for a “situation video”—this one called “Stop-and-Frisk”—appears. In this script, an unidentified speaker (who appears to be a lawyer) tells a story about driving home from a client’s house one night, knowing he’ll be pulled over by the police. He can just feel that this is going to happen. And sure enough, it does, an officer asking him to get out of the car and telling him to lie on the ground. The officer claims that this man fits the description of a criminal on the run, and though the narrator is not this person, he is quite accustomed to being the person who “fit[s] the description.” In the end, he is charged for speeding even though the officer originally said he wasn’t speeding. He is then fingerprinted and asked to strip, at which point the police tell him to dress and walk home.
Stop-and-frisk policing is a method of law enforcement that is prone to racial profiling, since it allows officers to stop civilians and search them for weapons or other illegal possessions without adequately justifying why. Stop-and-frisk is a notoriously racist policy, one that has led to stereotyping and many unfair interactions between police officers and people of color. In this “situation video,” a lawyer who has done nothing wrong is not only treated like a criminal, but dehumanized and humiliated by the police officers who force him to strip naked before letting him go. All the while, he knows he’s experiencing this simply because he fits a “description” of another black man, meaning that the authorities are subjecting him to this mistreatment for no other reason than the color of his skin.
Themes
In a section called “In Memory of Mark Duggan,” the book’s protagonist (“you”) is at a party in London. Leaning against the wall, she talks to a novelist about the riots that have erupted nearby, taking note of the fact that this man seems to care deeply about what’s happening. The riots that have broken out are in response to the murder of Mark Duggan, a black man who was a father, husband, and “suspected drug dealer.” He was killed by law enforcement officers belonging to a unit dealing with gun-related crimes in predominantly black communities. As people start rioting and looting in the aftermath of this shooting, the government—and, in turn, the media—upholds that the breakout is nothing but “opportunism.” As the media continues to report on the riots, it becomes clear that many viewers have stopped thinking about why the outrage began in the first place.
When the media frames the rioting and looting that takes place after Mark Duggan’s murder as “opportunism,” it becomes clear that the situation’s narrative has been distorted. Rather than paying attention to the injustice of Duggan’s murder, many disparage London’s black community. In this way, they delegitimize the very reasonable anger that people feel in response to a needless tragedy, making it even harder to cope with an already difficult situation.
Themes
The novelist at the party asks the protagonist if she is going to write about Mark Duggan. Instead of answering this question, she asks him the same thing. “Me?” he replies. As he says this, he looks somewhat agitated or annoyed, prompting the protagonist to wonder how hard it really is for a person of one race to empathize with a person of another race in such moments. Thinking this way, she wonders if the injustices that led to the riots are truly that hard for a white person to comprehend.
Although the protagonist has found a white person who shares her anger about how black people are treated in contemporary society, she realizes that the empathy he feels is somewhat compromised. Rather than relating to the tragedy of Mark Duggan’s death on a human level, he seems to approach it in the abstract, as if he can’t fully understand the anger that the protagonist herself feels. This, in turn, causes the protagonist to question why someone would ever feel disconnected from this kind of tragedy, since any human should be able to understand this sorrow and anger.
Themes
In a script for a “situation video” about the 2006 soccer World Cup, a number of quotes appear by writers and thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. Spliced together in this fashion, the quotes are paired with a frame-by-frame photographic progression of the moment during the 2006 World Cup when the French player Zinedine Zidane headbutted the Italian player Marco Materazzi. At first, the images depict Zidane jogging away from Materazzi. Beneath the initial strip of pictures, there is a quote by Zidane himself, who says that every day he thinks about where he’s from and is proud to be the person he is. Beneath this quote there is an account of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane. According to professional lip readers, Materazzi called Zidane a “Big Algerian shit,” a “dirty terrorist,” and the n-word.
France and Europe has a long history of racism against Algerian people. Calling upon this painful dynamic, Materazzi reduces Zidane to his ethnicity, flinging racist and bigoted words at him. This interaction might seem surprising in the context of the 2006 World Cup, but it’s unfortunately not all that astonishing, since anti-Muslim sentiments are still quite prominent in contemporary times and were perhaps especially pronounced in the 2000s, when there was so much international concentration on terrorism, which many people unfairly associated with all Muslims. Once again, then, readers see how foolish it is to think that bigotry is a thing of the past.
Themes
After the lipreaders’ account of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane, there is a quote from Frantz Fanon about how Algerian people frequently find themselves the “target of criticism for their European comrades.” Moreover, Fanon suggests that many Algerians have assumed that they can “answer the blows received without any serious problem of conscience.” At this point, another photographic progression appears, this time depicting the moment that Zidane hears what Materazzi has said and begins to turn around. Below this, James Baldwin suggests in a short passage that every black man knows what it’s like to want to “smash any white face” in an act of “vengeance.” At the same time, Baldwin upholds that each black man also knows that he must make an “adjustment” in response to this urge or, at the very least, must try to make this kind of “adjustment.”
The quotes Rankine draws from Fanon and Baldwin speak to how people who have been impacted by bigotry respond to such offenses. Fanon, for his part, considers the mistreatment Algerians face in Europe, whereas Baldwin focuses on racism against black people. Both, however, acknowledge the impulse to fight back against racism, framing this emotional process as immediate and practically overwhelming. But Baldwin goes on to suggest that it is often necessary to make an “adjustment” to this kind of emotional response. This aligns with the notion that anger sometimes only invites more racism and mistreatment. Baldwin seems cognizant of this dynamic, which is why he upholds that black people must at least try to find ways to keep themselves from “smash[ing]” the white people who treat them so poorly. Of course, the fact that he says it is necessary to try to make this “adjustment” implies that it will not always be possible to do so, as emotion can overtake people. That Zidane is about to headbutt Materazzi is a perfect illustration of this.
Themes
In the frame-by-frame photographic progression, Zidane approaches Materazzi. The words Materazzi said to him repeat multiple times, as quotes continue to circulate. A passage by Frantz Fanon considers what it’s like for an Algerian man to cope with his anger in the face of discrimination. Just before Zidane’s head collides with Materazzi’s chest, a famous quote by Frederick Douglass appears: “But at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight.” As Materazzi is knocked off his feet and falls to the ground, another excerpt from James Baldwin concludes the sequence, as the author writes: “The rebuttal assumes an original form.”
It’s worth remembering that the protagonist has wondered in the past what her “outburst” would look like if she allowed herself to show her anger. Like Serena Williams’s actions at the 2009 U.S. Open, Zinedine Zidane’s decision to headbutt Materazzi is an example of what it looks like to allow oneself to respond to injustice in real time—or, as Frederick Douglass might put it, what it might look like when somebody finally “resolve[s] to fight.”
Themes
A new script begins, this time for a so-called “Public Fiction” called “Making Room.” In this section, the protagonist (“you”) boards a train and notices that a woman standing near her has decided not to sit in the train car’s only open seat. This, the protagonist sees, is because the woman doesn’t want to sit next to the man in the neighboring seat—a fact that upsets the protagonist, who makes a show of taking the seat. As she sits, the man doesn’t look in her direction, instead staring out the window into the darkness. Still, she senses that he’s very aware that she has just taken the seat, since she supposes that he’s so used to thinking about the empty seat beside him that he barely needs to pay any attention to it anymore.
Returning to the protagonist, readers are once more invited to consider the everyday manifestations of racism that people of color constantly experience. This time, the protagonist focuses not on her own mistreatment, but on the glaring assumptions her fellow passengers have made about the man sitting next to the empty seat. Although it’s never stated that this man is African American, the protagonist’s empathy suggests that the main reason nobody is sitting next to him is because he is a black man—and, of course, because they have preconceived and unfair ideas about what this means.
Themes
A new seat opens up on the train and the woman who avoided the seat next to the man in question now sits down, prompting the protagonist to look to see if the man has noticed—he is still looking out the window. The protagonist senses that the empty space beside him follows him wherever he goes. She then begins to wonder whether her decision to sit next to him has actually benefitted him or if she’s doing it for herself. However, this thought dissipates when a nearby passenger asks somebody else to move so she and her child can sit together. Upon hearing this, the man turns to look at the protagonist, and as they gaze at each other, the protagonist knows they have tacitly decided not to move if somebody asks them to, silently agreeing to say they’re traveling as a family.
The protagonist sits next to the man on the train out of a sense of empathy, but she soon worries that this is a self-serving gesture. After all, perhaps the man doesn’t need her reassurance that he is worth sitting next to—maybe he, unlike her, is able to discount what racist people think of him. However, her decision to sit next to him turns into something meaningful when he turns to look at her, making it clear that he sees her kindness as an act of solidarity, not one of pity. Communicating nonverbally, he and the protagonist then feel supported by one another despite the unaccommodating atmosphere of their immediate environment, which is full of people who are clearly biased against black people.
Themes
