Citizen: An American Lyric

by

Claudia Rankine

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Themes and Colors
Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy Theme Icon
Identity and Sense of Self Theme Icon
Anger and Emotional Processing Theme Icon
History and Erasure Theme Icon
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

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. Throughout the book, Rankine refers to the protagonist in the second-person tense (“you”) so that readers effectively experience the book as this person (a black woman)…

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Identity and Sense of Self

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen explores the very complicated manner in which race and racism affect identity construction. The book invites readers to consider how people conceive of their own identities and, more specifically, what this process looks like for black people cultivating a sense of self in the context of America’s fraught racial dynamics. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on one’s self-conception. At first, the protagonist believes…

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Anger and Emotional Processing

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. In particular, she considers the effect anger has on an individual, illustrating the frustrating conundrum many people of color experience when they encounter small instances of bigotry (often called microaggressions) and are expected to simply let these things go. The general expectation, Rankine upholds, is that people of color must simply “move on” from their anger, letting racist remarks slide in the name…

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History and Erasure

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen provides a nuanced look at the many ways in which humanity’s racist history brings itself to bear on the present. Considering what she calls the “social death of history,” Rankine suggests that contemporary culture has largely adopted an ahistorical perspective, one that fails to recognize the lasting effects of bigotry. This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are…

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