Identity and Sense of Self Theme Analysis

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 that racists often fail to truly see black people—whether this means literally overlooking their presence, or, more metaphorically, refusing to acknowledge their worth. However, as Citizen progresses, the protagonist adopts the philosopher Judith Butler’s idea that humans are susceptible to hurtful language because the mere act of “being” makes them “addressable,” meaning that simply existing renders people vulnerable to whatever others might say about them. With this in mind, the protagonist refigures her idea of how racism impacts identity, realizing that the problem she faces isn’t invisibility in the presence of racists, but “hypervisib[ility]”—essentially, standing out starkly as a person of color in a majority-white environment. Calling upon the author Zora Neale Hurston’s assertion that she feels “most colored when [she’s] thrown against a sharp white background,” Rankine implies that the outside world is capable of significantly altering the way people approach and view their own identities and cultural positioning.

Before considering the concept of “hypervisib[ility],” Rankine establishes what it feels like to experience what seems—at first—like cultural invisibility. From an early age, the book’s protagonist comes to realize that the people around her frequently treat her as if she’s not really there. When, for instance, a white girl (Mary Catherine) in the protagonist’s class convinces her to lean to one side so she can copy her answers on a test, the protagonist wonders why their teacher, Sister Evelyn, doesn’t notice. Thinking about this, she wonders if Sister Evelyn possibly “never actually saw [the protagonist] sitting there” in the first place, feeling as if she’s invisible to her very own instructor. Later, as an adult, the protagonist is on a train when a white man walks into a young black boy and he doesn’t even notice, despite the fact that he knocked the boy to the ground. Witnessing this, the protagonist wishes that the man would turn around and help the boy up, but she soon thinks that this would never happen because the boy is invisible to the man, who “has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.” According to this idea, people like this white man only acknowledge individuals who look like them and in whom they recognize themselves. In turn, it becomes clear that the protagonist has already grasped the notion that the external world is somehow related to a person’s sense of self, intuiting that there is a relationship between a person’s race, the way they navigate the world, and how they conceive of themselves.

Of course, the difference between the white man who knocks over the black boy and the protagonist herself is that the man allows his sense of self to influence the way he interacts with the world, whereas the protagonist’s interactions with the world are what influence her sense of self. Put another way, the white man experiences a certain level of privilege because being part of the racial majority in the U.S. means he never has to second-guess his own cultural positioning. But this isn’t necessarily the same way the outside world brings itself to bear on black people, who often feel diminished by racist societal structures. And yet, this feeling of diminishment doesn’t mean that black people are “invisible”—in fact, the protagonist eventually comes to believe that black people are especially visible, since the color of their skin opens them up to all kinds of mistreatment and injustice. To that end, the protagonist comes to feel “hypervisible,” a notion that aligns with Rankine’s thoughts about Venus and Serena Williams, the famous professional tennis players who are among the sport’s only people of color. Watching the way the tennis community mistreats the Williams sisters leads Rankine to further consider the experience of being black in a “historically white space.” Thinking this way, she turns to a line written by the author Zora Neale Hurston: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This idea suggests that “historically white space[s]” have the power to reorient the way black people feel about their own identities. By being “hypervisible,” it seems, people of color suddenly find themselves scrutinizing who they are from the external, foreign, and often critical perspective of their white peers.

Interestingly enough, this kind of thinking changes the protagonist’s feeling of invisibility in “white space[s],” but it doesn’t change the overall idea that identity is profoundly influenced by the surrounding circumstances. In this regard, a person’s sense of self is dependent upon context, and this is why it’s so problematic that racism continues to flourish in the world at large—after all, if a person’s sense of self is formed in relation to the relevant social environment, then the conditions of that environment will bring themselves to bear on that person’s entire self-conception. This, Rankine intimates, is why racism poses such a threat to black peoples’ identities, since it’s capable of distorting the way they see themselves.