Citizen essay

Citizen by Claudia Rankine is written in the voice of poetry, about moments and experiences in people’s lives, specifically of people of color. Main Themes that you find Rankine covers are racism and discrimination. She describes how easy it is to say something offensive and for it to be interpreted wrong but still hurts the same and is still as racist. She also describes how poeple will will degrade other people just to make themselves feel better. Claudia Rankine  exhibits her book Citizen to show her audience how racism, discrimination, and the attempt to make someone feel inferior affects people.

Claudia Rankine describes the negativity of discrimination and putting others down through part two of her book. Part two covers the stories about the world famous tennis player Serena Williams. It exhibits people picking out things she had done and criticized the way she lived her life and the way she continues to do so. “All the bad calls, the boos, the criticisms that she has made ugly the game of tennis – through her looks as well as her behavior – the entire cluster of betrayals will be wiped clean with this win” (Rankine, 31). Comments like these, may seem minor to most but in the mind of a person who is being told that it lingers and almost feels like an open wound. In some point of our lives we’ve experienced something like this. Having heard  someone make a comment about the way you looked one day, you can’t stop thinking about and whether or not the person realized they were hurting your feelings you start to feel self conscious and that itself is a lingering feeling.

In the stories Rankine uses she uses to talk about how people lives to an everyday basses are affected by discrimination. In these stories She writes,  “When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black! I didn’t mean to say that, he then says. Aloud, you say. What? he asks. You didn’t mean to say that aloud. Your transaction goes swiftly after that”(44). While making the comment this man stops himself for a second to take back his comment but has already exerted a message that is offensive and hateful. The person, whose perspective is used in the story, still felt the unkindness and discrimination in the man’s words. “Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life”(7). Even though you are meant to assume that this friend had no idea the negative impact she was making on the person’s life, you are still able to pick up on how hurt the person was that someone so close could be so unaware of their words and how that reflects on them as a person

Both of the themes in this book are quite interwoven. Both hurt just as much with intention behind it than completely on accident, or maybe just accidentally out loud. “Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation”(50). Words like these start to make you question what the man means by a foreign film without translation. Could someone’s life be so alienated to someone that they could compare it to an untranslated foreign film? Or is this just a perfect example to make someone else feel inferior to another.“And when the woman with multiple degrees says, I didn’t know black women could get cancer, instinctively you take two steps back though all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here(45). The way this woman assumes cancer does not exist for a black woman because of the way she looks is a good example of someone invalidating this person’s experience of illness just because of their skin color. especially discriminatory and racist because of the fact that Rankine has made sure to mention that this woman is very well educated which could say that she is aware of her intentions.