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). This protagonist (“you”) interacts with a number of white people who overlook their own implicit, unexamined biases, effectively giving themselves permission to say racist and insensitive things to the protagonist. In many of these cases, they do this because they think they can—in their conversations with the protagonist—transcend the normal boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. However, they only think this because, as white people, they haven’t had to process the lifetime’s worth of discrimination that many people of color have had to endure. Accordingly, the white people in the book convince themselves that they exist in a world in which racism no longer exists, failing to grasp not only that this is untrue, but also that their ignorance actually perpetuates racism and makes it harder to confront. Worse, when the protagonist summons the courage to point out that what her interlocutors have said is problematic, many of them simply accuse her of being too sensitive, thereby delegitimizing her very reasonable reaction. This, in turn, makes it even harder for her to challenge bigotry, ultimately suggesting that such implicit biases threaten to devalue otherwise legitimate responses to racism.
Throughout Citizen, Rankine calls attention to the ways in which people often discount their own racist behavior. One of the main problems the protagonist faces is that so many people in her daily life think they can transcend what it means to be racist. In other words, many of the white people in her life are unwilling to examine their own implicit biases, assuming that they exist in a world in which such biases don’t cause harm. As a result, they think they’re subverting or sidestepping racism when, in reality, they’re perpetuating it. This is evident when the protagonist attends a reading at the university where she’s a professor. When a student asks the visiting writer (who is a humorist) what makes a joke funny, he talks about context, proposing that most people would laugh with their friends at certain jokes that they might not laugh at “out in public where black people could hear what was said.” Suddenly, the protagonist realizes that she has been implicitly excluded from the rest of the audience. By framing his answer like this, the writer forces the protagonist to grapple with the fact that he isn’t addressing her, he’s addressing the white people in the audience. Simply put, his response implies a white person’s perspective. Furthermore, the writer has admitted to finding racist jokes funny—but he doesn’t seem to mind admitting this, clearly believing that this is permissible. The fact that he adopts this mindset without any guilt indicates that he doesn’t think he’s being racist—a sign that bigotry is so firmly entrenched in society and everyday life that it somehow goes unexamined by the very people keeping it alive.
Of course, this kind of implicit racism doesn’t go unexamined by everybody. People of color acutely feel the harmful effects of bigoted comments, which accumulate and sometimes turn into even more obvious instances of racism. This is apparent when the protagonist is waiting in line at Starbucks and she hears a white man standing next to her call a group of loud teenagers the n-word. Unwilling to let this slide, the protagonist objects by saying, “Hey, I am standing right here.” In response, the man asks, “Why do you care?” This stuns the protagonist, and for good reason: this man has just used the most offensive word possible to refer to black people and now he’s acting like he doesn’t understand why this would upset the protagonist. In this way, the man condescends to her, delegitimizing her right to be angry. Gathering herself, the protagonist defends the teenagers, saying, “They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them.” Hearing this, the man replies, “Now there you go,” acting as if the protagonist is the one who has made the conversation about race. In this moment, the man exposes his own racism by using the n-word and then he immediately criticizes the protagonist for being too sensitive when she responds accordingly. In turn, readers see that even transparently racist people are capable of finding ways to convince themselves that they’re not racist. Moreover, it becomes painfully clear how hard it is to challenge bigotry when the very people setting forth this kind of prejudice actively deny the implications of their behavior.
On the whole, Citizen showcases the emotional impact that facing constant racism—and the kind of manipulation that often accompanies it—can have on a person. Because racists are often so quick to belittle or delegitimize the way their behavior affects people of color, Rankine intimates that there is sometimes very little people can do to effectively push back against bigotry in the moment they experience it. To endure so many aggressions (small, subtle, or otherwise), she implies, it is sometimes necessary to numb oneself to the world. Unfortunately, though, this creates a certain negative experience in and of itself, since the very lack of feeling can be painful—after all, numbness only reminds people that they felt the need to numb themselves in the first place. In this way, Citizen is a study of what it’s like to live with the constant pain of racism in a world that largely refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of that pain or, for that matter, the racism that caused it.
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Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy ThemeTracker
Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy Quotes in Citizen: An American Lyric
You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.
Sister Evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy Mary Catherine's answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there.
After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.
Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks.
Feeling somewhat responsible for the actions of your neighbor, you clumsily tell your friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard. He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants. Yes, of course, you say. Yes, of course.
When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.
He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.
Now there you go, he responds.
Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.
The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.
Youngman's suggestions are meant to expose expectations for blackness as well as to underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage. The commodified anger his video advocates rests lightly on the surface for spectacle's sake. It can be engaged or played like the race card and is tied solely to the performance of blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations.
On the bridge between this sellable anger and "the artist" resides, at times, an actual anger. Youngman in his video doesn't address this type of anger: the anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color. This other kind of anger in time can prevent, rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness.
What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background."
And though you felt outrage for Serena after that 2004 US Open, as the years go by, she seems to put Alves, and a lengthening list of other curious calls and oversights, against both her and her sister, behind her as they happen.
Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.
And as Serena turns to the lineswoman and says, “I swear to God I’m fucking going to take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” As offensive as her outburst is, it is difficult not to applaud her for reacting immediately to being thrown against a sharp white background. It is difficult not to applaud her for existing in the moment, for fighting crazily against the so-called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line.
Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.
For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background.
Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.
Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go. Come on. Come on. Come on. In due time the ball is going back and forth over the net. Now the sound can be turned back down. Your fingers cover your eyes, press them deep into their sockets—too much commotion, too much for a head remembering to ache. Move on. Let it go. Come on.
Occasionally it is interesting to think about the outburst if you would just cry out—
To know what you'll sound like is worth noting—
And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, she said, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, so many of these people almost all of them that we see, are so poor, someone else said, and they are so black.
Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue.
Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of aggravated adolescence charging forward in their way experiencing the position of positioning which is a position for only one kind of boy face it know it for the other boy for the other boys the fists the feet criminalized already are weapons already exploding the landscape and then the litigious hitting back is life imprisoned.
Will you write about Duggan? the man wants to know. Why don't you? you ask. Me? he asks, looking slightly irritated.
How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?
You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it's okay, I'm okay, you don't need to sit here. You don't need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.
All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?
The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who?
From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don't hear. You can't see.
It's then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you'll tell them we are traveling as a family.
Come on, get back in the car. Your partner wants to face off with a mouth and who knows what handheld objects the other vehicle carries.
Trayvon Martin's name sounds from the car radio a dozen times each half hour. You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans.
Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.
Yesterday, I begin, I was waiting in the car for time to pass. A woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine. Our eyes met and what passed passed as quickly as the look away. She backed up and parked on the other side of the lot. I could have followed her to worry my question but I had to go, I was expected on court, I grabbed my racket.
[…]
Did you win? he asks.
It wasn't a match, I say. It was a lesson.
