A review by emilyinherhead
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying (135)

This is a short yet powerful work, part poetry, part essay, part memoir, part elegy, part performance art. Rankine writes about racist micro- (and macro-) aggressions, police brutality, higher education, sports, art, and how it feels for Black people to simply exist in America.

So many times, I set the book down to look up something or someone she references, and in doing so I learned about some historical and more recent cultural events with which I was previously unfamiliar. For example, while I know who Serena Williams is, and was aware that she and her sister had experienced racism in the tennis community, I didn’t know (and subsequently learned) about some pretty blatantly targeted calls against her through the years, or her well-justified outbreak of anger at the 2009 US Open, or the awful treatment she faced at Indian Mills in the early 2000s which led to her extended boycott. I’m grateful to Rankine for prompting some really informative internet rabbit holes, and for her thoughtful and poetic commentary.

I also loved the addition of supplementary artwork interspersed throughout. There are a few pieces that I’m still thinking about and returning to, like a photo of a public lynching from 1930, and an oil painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner from 1840 called The Slave Ship.

This was my first experience of Claudia Rankine’s work but it definitely will not be my last.