Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican born, award winning poet author, and essayist. She writes about race in a way that illuminates what it feels like to exist in Black skin against the backdrop of White America. She is a master surgical physician with words, cutting through flesh, muscle, down to the bone–making visible the trauma caused by systemic racism.
In her 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine explores systemic racial injustices that can sometimes be elusive and subtle, or violent and intrusive to Black bodies through poems, essays, photographs, and art. Rankin describes these everyday microaggressions and violent acts of hatred through shared histories and experiences, collected stories, and personal encounters. She gives us words to help navigate the complicated terrain of systemic racism in the United States and better understand how it takes shelter in Black and White bodies.
I could find my own thoughts in her words and stories, as a Black woman working in the field of education, the many microaggressions, slights, and dismissals I had experienced over the years had taken a toll on my sense of being in the world. These experiences I put away and left unaddressed in order to continue on. I swallowed all the rage until it became part of me, digested it until it was released as a palpable sigh. I continued to repeat the same cycle, starting over and over again, when every place is the same place. Citizen: An American Lyric asks us to reflect honestly on the historical record and consider what America is and what it means to be a citizen. It asks us to tale personal accountability for the type of world we want to belong in.
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