Citizen: An American Lyric Themes

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. Throughout the book, Rankine refers to the protagonist in the second-person tense (“you”) so that readers effectively experience the book as this person (a black woman)…

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen explores the very complicated manner in which race and racism affect identity construction. The book invites readers to consider how people conceive of their own identities and, more specifically, what this process looks like for black people cultivating a sense of self in the context of America’s fraught racial dynamics. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on one’s self-conception. At first, the protagonist believes…

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen provides a nuanced look at the many ways in which humanity’s racist history brings itself to bear on the present. Considering what she calls the “social death of history,” Rankine suggests that contemporary culture has largely adopted an ahistorical perspective, one that fails to recognize the lasting effects of bigotry. This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are…