Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine's bold book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
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Community Reviews
Provocative truly exemplifies this set of essays on race. They will provide me with food for thought for a long time.
I almost gave this book 4 stars (or 4.5 stars) because it is a difficult book to read. It's painful. I had to go slower than I wanted to go to really take it in. I felt dejected. I felt defeated. I felt outside the experience. I felt suffocated inside it. It's really hard to read. When I got to the end, I realized that all my agonizing meant Rankine had done an amazing job as an artist.
I know there was much of this that I did not understand.
I know that, as someone who is white, there is much of this that I cannot understand.
And you? If you were also born with that white privilege silver spoon in your mouth? You cannot understand either. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't seek to. That doesn't mean it's not extremely important for you to read this.
And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only...read more
I know that, as someone who is white, there is much of this that I cannot understand.
And you? If you were also born with that white privilege silver spoon in your mouth? You cannot understand either. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't seek to. That doesn't mean it's not extremely important for you to read this.
And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only...read more
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