Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: on microaggressions and macro-implications

Claudia Rankine’s work, Citizen; An American Lyric does the work of a first person examination of the black experience of citizenship and its contradictions, often using microaggressions as material for this examination. Not only does Rankine flesh out the somatic feeling of these instances, she goes into great depth about their cumulative mental impact and the meanings behind what appear to be simple interactions.
    Take for example this interaction:

In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my God, I didn’t see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.
(77)

And then the rest of the page is white space, left as if to signify silence, white silence, or space for the reader to ruminate on the deceivingly high gravity of thee situation. What Rankine is really touching on here is the invisibility of black people, black women especially, in the modern public sphere. The man made no effort to be rude; he’s simply been conditioned to not see black women in space the same way he sees white people. Rankine goes on to explore how blacks are subjected to a dichotomy of states of presence, fluctuating between invisibility and hypervisibility.
    The current moment in America may be relatively free from blatant racial violence as compared to pre-Brown v. Board, and public opinion may have shifted, but America faces a new kind of racial problem: whites think racism is largely a thing of the past. Meaning well doesn’t mean squat when inability to confront or understand the issues of the current moment actually play into the oppression of blacks. In essence, microaggressions are insidious little stabs from larger structural injustices, the cumulative effect of which is crippling to blacks. Rankine accounts for this accumulation, when after being asked by a clerk if she thinks her credit card will work, she finds that the question, “‘What is wrong with you’” has become “stuck in [her] dreams” (54). Rankine knows her self-doubt is illogical since her credit card works fine, but rather cannot help the way it “sticks“ to her unconscious, sabotaging her aspirations.
The “you” of her experiences, because the book is almost entirely in second person, sighs a lot in this section. While a sigh seems like a relatively trivial detail, Rankine goes on for pages about what sighing signifies. “It is not the iteration of a free being. What else can you liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?” (60). Rankine is going into how the onslaught of life as an African-American in an America that does not recognize your struggle is one of the most tangible and ever-present elements of the overall problem of racial inequity. When one is constantly in a state of frustration and resignation it makes one feel less than human, because one is alienated from one’s best self. Modern racial inequity is still about violence, just of a subtler variety.

1. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.