In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. In a 2020 interview with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, Rankine describes the project as a book of “collected stories.” She informs viewers that the stories inside Citizen come not only from her own experiences, but also from the very real experiences of her friends and family.[1] Citizen attempts to capture racism’s impact even in our most mundane routines, such as taking the subway, going out to lunch, or visiting the therapist. Often taking on the second person to describe these numerous instances, the book demonstrates how microaggressions and anti-black racism are simply common occurrences in the everyday lives of Black people.
Not only do I think Citizen is simply a beautiful collection of work, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for teaching students the imperatives of race and racial projects. This semester, I’ve been teaching the English department’s 100 level course on Race and Literary Texts. For many of my students, my class is the first time they’ve explicitly discussed race in an academic space. We’ve spent much of the semester discussing the ways that anti-blackness is an ongoing project in the United States. We’ve looked at films such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and even The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. I think Citizen has been impactful for connecting the institutional and structural dimensions of racial discrimination to the isolated moments, conversations, and interactions that students see in their own lives.
One of the reasons why I think Citizen is so effective as a teaching tool is because it is a multimedia experience. Claudia Rankine collaborated with her husband John Lucas on a number of “Situation Videos,” to accompany the text. In the classroom, the situation videos are equally instructive, if not more so. For example, Situation 6 “Stop-and-Frisk” visually and sonically demonstrates how anti-black racism shapes the everyday lives of Black people. In the video, we view two Black young men shopping for clothing. The footage of them trying on clothing is overlaid with red and blue police lights. As viewers watch the Black men move through the store viewing and purchasing items, they also hear police sirens, as well as Rankine reading her poem “Stop-and-Frisk.” Upon showing the video to my students, they told me that they expected to see something much worse in the video, such as a display of police violence, and were surprised that the video simply depicted the young Black men shopping. My students were surprised by the melancholy, monotone tone Rankine employs to recite the words. This wasn’t the affect they expected from a poem detailing a violent encounter with the police. In the short film, they took note of Rankine’s repetition of the lines “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description / because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (Rankine 106). All these elements together solidified for my students the ways in which criminalization, policing, and surveillance are integrated into the everyday lives of Black people. As they articulated to me, Situation Video 6 demonstrates that Black people can become subjects of violence at any moment. Our conversation about these elements was incredibly generative.
However, as a Black woman, reading and teaching Citizen is difficult. It’s hard, and it’s wearing. When I read, I feel the narrator’s exhaustion, or, perhaps, become increasingly aware of my own. I find myself attempting to breathe along with the narrator’s every “sigh.” (Rankine 59). I’ve read the book four or five times, and the more I read it, the more I struggle to get through it. The microaggressions described in the book are numerous, yet nearly every situation mirrors moments in my own life. The poems are reminders of the racist actions and comments I’ve received for simply existing in primarily white spaces. Every time I read the book, I’m confronted with just how invisible I can be in many spaces I inhabit. How much anti-blackness I’ve been made to brush off and how much I’ve internalized despite my best efforts.
In reading Citizen, confronting my own deep sadness for the innumerable lives lost due to anti-black violence is unavoidable. Each time I’ve sat down to read the book in full, Rankine’s poem, “July 29-August 18, 2014 / Making Room,” increases in length. This is a poem which ends by repeating “In Memory of,” listing numerous, recognizable names of Black men and women who have been murdered by police. And while this list only consisted of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown’s names when I read it in fall 2014, the book has continually been reprinted to include more and more names. When we discussed the poem in class, my students were in awe of the fact that this list now includes over 30 household names. The list of those we must mourn only keeps getting longer.
This time around, the difficulty with reading Citizen is compounded by another anxiety: While the book has been generative and eye opening for some students, I worry that reading the book may be an added burden for my most vulnerable students. I worry that that they too struggle to get through the book. I worry that rather than affirming my Black students and other students of color, reading Citizen instead requires them to confront the racism they experience every day. I worry that while discussing Citizen offers white students an opportunity to exercise and explore their capacity for empathy, it only demonstrates to my Black students insights they already knew.
In my last Broadly Textual post, I began to question how we handle Black trauma inside cinema’s depictions of enslavement. This week, I question the best way to manage and negotiate the circulation of Black trauma in our classrooms. I think that our conversations around Citizen must always keep in mind the intersecting racial and gender dynamics of the classroom. Engaging Citizen requires holding space for our most vulnerable students, without putting them on the spot, or positioning them as objects of study. Teaching Citizen might require us to reach out to students and offer words of encouragement. It might even require sharing our own reservations and struggles with the subject of the text. While I’ve outlined here how Citizen can be an effective means to engage students on the topic of anti-black racism, teaching it involves a certain amount of precarity. While I’m still working out answers to my question, what I do know is that educators should always listen carefully to responses from their students of color, never taking for granted how closely Citizen might mirror their everyday lives.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpREs2WTbWA
[2] Still from Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situation Video 6, “Stop-and-Frisk” https://vimeo.com/157537847