Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is absolutely fascinating. It literally helps its readers going through the same complex waters of how racism is lived, seen and felt by black Americans. Reading her, one comes out with a sense of knowing what it means to fill these shoes, this hoodie, this body. Rankine wants us to understand how one can become “invisible and hypervisible” in language and life — as she has.
Line by line we are invited to share her her race’s very deepest and most personal feelings and thoughts. Her line in which she says: “I feel most colored when I’m thrown against white background”(53) drives me to think about my own self driven to live a life with people to whom I don’t belong, and with whom I tend to be driven to feel less, belittled, and down-looked at. How “Colored” people are “colored” and the realization of being “colored” gratifies whenever a “colored” person is thrown in the middest of white people.
This piece of art with all its language, pictures, paintings, and piercings adequately serves as a vehicle that convey’s black citizens experience. “For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person,” Rankine says. “Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please.”(49) Rankine, who recognized the quiet violence makes this struggle visible throughout the book.
Like Rankine, I also thought racism was about taking away someone’s humanity so that they could disappear. It feels right when she says that racist language exploits all the ways that a person is present, although I don’t honestly know how to take that comment. Is it designed to punish the individual for having the “audacity” to try to be a person, and push them back to a state of erasure? Is it pushing them farther into the present, making them hyperpresent as a mere body to the point of discomfort? It is a very interesting statement.
What I took from Rankine’s narrative is that most of the time people uses that racist languge unconsciously that creates a sensitive consciousness for those offended. Most of the personal or collective rasist experiences that she talks about is related to that being consciousness about your identity when you enter a territory where creates a constrast with your color, personality or emotions. But I am wondering do we sometimes read the languages or signs wrong because of our sensitive consciousness?