We are presented with these instances in the form of an onslaught with little time to unpack, and just as we find ourselves fatigued, we are given a reprieve in the form of a short reflection. They range from the insinuation that writers of color are inferior, to the lack of understanding of affirmative action, to multiple cases of mistaken identity and many others. As readers, we experience invisibility, an unsettled feeling in the belly, and the confusion that comes with micro-aggressions. The narrative techniques Rankine uses force the reader to face the ugly reality of racism in America today while allowing readers who haven’t experienced it to do so through second person narratives. Racism is still alive, it just looks a little bit different. After it happened I was at a loss for words.” She proves something I had suspected, and gives me the words to describe something I had seen and been going through for years. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine teaches her readers about micro-aggressions. Within these sections Rankine utilizes photographs and other works of art to contrast or supplement her words. It is split into multiple sections, alternating between short vignettes about every day micro-aggressions that black people in America face, and longer, more reflective works of poetry that serve as a reflection on the vignettes. Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a book-length work of poetry that weaves together prose, photographs, and references to current events in order to paint a picture of race relations and invite a larger conversation about the way we see and talk about racism. I felt an anger that pushed me to learn more about how we got here where we can go. 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.” My political and social consciousness was still a work in progress the first time I read Citizen, as was the case for many Americans at the time, but I remember feeling moved by the way Rankine wrote and saw the world. A poet whose name I can’t remember came to visit my English class, and he read from page 105, “Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. The very first time I heard Claudia Rankine’s words was in my final year of high school, when Citizen: An American Lyric was first published and the Black Lives Matter movement was surging.
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