Citizen

My Thoughts:

Citizen, by Claudia Rankine is a multi-genre examination of racial aggressions towards African Americans. Some of these essays, poems, artwork, media have to do with being invisible, slips of the tongue that are taken differently based on one's positionality or marginality, public lynching, police brutality. 

Although I have not quite come up with an answer, as I was reading this I kept trying to figure out what the author is saying about citizenship in the United States. As an Indigenous reader who believes that our nation was illegally overthrown by the United States, this question of who is  a "citizen" from the lens of marginalized, oppressed, non-white citizens is profoundly important.

Beginnings:

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.

Description:

Claudia Rankine's bold new 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.