A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as “you.” A child, this character is sitting in class one day when the white girl sitting behind her quietly asks her to lean over so she can copy her test answers. Even though it will be obvious that the girl behind her is cheating, the protagonist obliges by leaning over, wondering all the while why her teacher hasn’t noticed. She determines that it’s either because her teacher doesn’t care about cheating or, worse, because she never truly saw the protagonist sitting there in the first place.
Continuing to detail the experiences of this unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates an instance later in the young woman’s life, when her friend frequently calls her by the name of her own housekeeper. The protagonist knows that her friend makes this mistake because the housekeeper is the only other black person in her life, but neither of them mention this. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesn’t forget this. In keeping with this indication that it’s difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called “Jim Crow Rd.” by the photographer Michael David Murphy. The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. In the foreground there stands a sign indicating that the neighborhood juts out off a street called Jim Crow Road—evidence that the country’s racist past is still woven throughout the structures of everyday life.
Rankine stays with the unnamed protagonist, who in response to racist comments constantly asks herself things like, “What did he just say?” and “Did I hear what I think I heard?” The problem, she realizes, is that racism is hard to cope with because before people of color can process instances of bigotry, they have to experience them. There is, in other words, no way of avoiding the initial pain. This dilemma arises frequently for the protagonist, like when a colleague at the university where she teaches complains to her about the fact that his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color. Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesn’t object. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didn’t have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable.
The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. Some of them, though, aren’t actually all that micro. For instance, when she and her partner go to a movie one night, they ask their friend—a black man—to pick up their child from school. On the drive back from the movie, the protagonist receives a call from her neighbor, who tells her that there’s a sinister looking man walking back and forth in front of her house. He is, the neighbor says, talking to himself. The protagonist insists that the man is her friend, reminding the neighbor that he has even met this person, but the neighbor refuses to believe this, saying that he has already called the police. Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is right. By the time she and her partner get to their house, the police have already come and gone, and the neighbor has apologized to their friend, who was simply on the phone. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. After a tense pause, he tells her that he can take his calls wherever he wants, and the protagonist is instantly embarrassed for telling him otherwise.
An even more pronouncedly racist moment occurs when the protagonist is in line at Starbucks and the white man standing in front of her calls a group of black teenagers the n-word. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like it’s not a big deal. When she tells him not to “get all KKK” on the teenagers, he says, “Now there you go,” trying to make it seem like the protagonist is the one who has overstepped, not him.
Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. The natural response to injustice is anger, but Rankine illustrates that this response isn’t always viable for people of color, since letting frustration show often invites even more mistreatment. To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. Recounting several of Williams’s “outburst[s]” in response to this unfairness, Rankine shows that responding to racism with anger—which understandably arises in such situations—often only makes matters worse, as is the case for Williams when she’s fined $82,500 for speaking out against a line judge who makes a blatantly biased call against her. Three years later, Serena Williams wins two gold medals at the 2012 Olympic Games, and when she celebrates by doing a three-second dance on the tennis court, commentators call her “immature and classless” for “Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.”
Rankine narrates another handful of uncomfortable instances in which the unnamed protagonist is forced to quietly endure racism. At one point, she attends a reading by a humorist who implies that it’s common for white people to laugh at racist jokes in private, adding that most people wouldn’t laugh at this kind of joke if they were out in public where black people might overhear them. When he says this, the protagonist realizes that the humorist has effectively excluded her from the rest of the audience by exclusively addressing the white people in the crowd, focusing only on their perspective while failing to recognize (or care about) how racist his remark really is.
At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people “addressable,” opening them up to verbal attack by others. In this moment, the protagonist realizes that being black in a white-dominated world doesn’t make her feel invisible, but “hypervisible.” This, in turn, accords with the author Zora Neale Hurston’s line that she feels “most colored” when she’s “thrown against a sharp white background.” These thoughts, however, don’t ease the pain—the persistent headache—that the protagonist feels on a daily basis because of the racist way people treat her. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private.
At this point, Citizen becomes more abstract and poetic, as Rankine writes scripts for “situation video[s]” she has made in collaboration with her partner, John Lucas, who is a visual artist. The first of these scripts is made up of quotes that the couple has taken from CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the terrible aftermath of the disaster. In disjointed and figurative writing, Rankine creates a sense of desperation and inequity, depicting what it feels like to belong to one of the many black communities along the Gulf Coast—communities that national relief organizations all but ignored and ultimately failed to properly serve after the hurricane devastated the area and left many people homeless.
Rankine moves on to present “situation video[s]” commemorating the deaths of a number of black men who were killed because of the color of their skin, including Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. She also writes about racist profiling in a script entitled “Stop-and-Frisk,” providing a first-person account by an unidentified narrator who is pulled over for no reason and mistreated by the police, all because he is a black man who “fit[s] the description” of a criminal for whom the police are supposedly looking.
Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. Leaning against the wall, they discuss the riots that have broken out in London as a response to the unjustified police killing of a young black man named Mark Duggan. The artist speaking to the protagonist is white, and he asks her if she’s going to write about Duggan. In response, the protagonist turns the question back around, asking why he doesn’t write about it. This confounds and seemingly irks him, prompting the protagonist to wonder why he would think it’d be difficult to properly feel “the injustice wheeled at” a person of another race.
The next “situation video” that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. Using frame-by-frame photographs that show the progression leading to the headbutt, Rankine quotes a number of writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. As the photographs show Zidane register what Materazzi has said, turn around, and approach him, Rankine provides excerpts from the previously mentioned thinkers, including Frantz Fanon’s thoughts about the history of discrimination against Algerian people in France. She also calls upon the accounts lip readers gave of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane, revealing that Materazzi called him a “Big Algerian shit,” a “dirty terrorist,” and the n-word.
In the final sections of the book, the second-person protagonist notices that nobody is willing to sit next to a certain black man on the train, so she takes the seat. Although the man doesn’t turn to look at her, she feels connected to him, understanding that it’s sometimes necessary to numb oneself to the many microaggressions and injustices hurled at black people. This consideration of numbness continues into the concluding section, entitled “July 13, 2013”—the day Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted. Rankine continues to examine the protagonist’s gravitation toward numbness before abruptly switching to first-person narration on the book’s final page to recount an interaction she has while lying in bed with her partner. She tells him she was killing time in the parking lot by the local tennis courts that day when a woman parked in the spot facing her car but, upon seeing the protagonist sitting across from her, put her car in reverse and parked elsewhere. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. “Did you win?” her partner asks. “It wasn’t a match,” she replies. “It was a lesson.”
