Who Are You? Summer 2017

Dear Claudia Rankine, Thank you for Citizen . Before even opening the book, the cover struck me as I examined the torn, limbless black hoodie, now a symbol for racial profiling and police brutality. I was reminded of Ta-Nehesi Coates who writes about the lack of control black people have other their bodies, their lives, that can be taken from them at any moment because of microagressions and racism- all down to a hoodie. A black hoodie stands in for a black man, its presence seems to alert and warn the white viewer to stand armed. Upon reading the book, I fell in love with the way you structure prose poetry- it flows through memories and emotions which are not organized neatly and clearly. You place the reader as the "you" as they explore everyday racism (also known as microaggressions) and its detrimental impact on the person; we are forced into the crippling, disorienting minds of an annoymous person. You powerfully portray how racism deteriorates the psyche of a black p...

Dear Ms. Rankine, I thought the piece on the cultivation of an angry black man or woman was especially interesting to me. It stood out because of the music I hear on the radio all the time. Rappers on every radio station channel this angry stereotype of what black males should be. Rage and anger are hard to channel into these rap lyrics over and over again, so I assume the rappers contrive this anger to fulfill audiences' wishes. I think it is sad that although this behavior perpetuates this idea that black men are violent and angry, it's the reason albums sell.

Dear Claudia Rankine, I love your book Citizen , from your language style to the way you described the experiences of black people. Using your own experience coupled with those of your friends and celebrities, you build images of everyday racist encounters that shocked me. "The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow." When reading your book, the idea that racism is still rampant in nowadays struck me so hard. Chapter two impressed me most. I am a tennis lover and I have watched a lot of Serena Williams' games. However, I never thought of the hardship she suffered as a black people in such a white dominated sport. The sufferings did not always come from punishments like probationary periods, but from "every look, every comment, every bad call blossom". She tried to fight back once, "reacting immediately to be thrown against a sharp white background", which resulting in loss, fine and probationary period. Later, she learnt t...

Dear Claudia Rankine, I was struck by the power of your words. You wrote your lyric in second persons' perspective, which bring us back to the situations you have encountered in your real life. By describing "your" action, "your conversation", "your friends", my emotion resonate with yours. By your intimate, heart-aching and powerful words, I feel like I have personally experienced your experience. I particularly like how you described the implicit racism many people of color have experienced in daily lives. The neighbor mistook a black friend as a intruder and called the police; a psychologist assumed a black person is a hooligan instead of a patient just because of her skin color. And what did they say? They said sorry, they were so sorry. And there was nothing you and I could say. Apology does not make up for the fact that racism, though not expressed explicitly under political correctness, has deeply engrained in people, especially white people...

Dear Claudia Rankine, As I was reading you book Citizen: An American Lyric , I was interested by the way you characterized the black body as historically tied and unfiltered from the outside world.   You mention that “you take in things you don’t want all the time”, and “the outside comes in” without provocation. This seems to be a defining aspect of the black experience in America as your words reminded me of a part from Theme for English B . In the poem, Hughes defines his identity by his external experiences saying, “I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear”, and for him, “It’s not easy to know what is true” about his identity, as it is constantly defined by outside forces and historical precedent. You say that “the past” is “buried in you” to the point where your body becomes a “public place”, trapped and defined by the racial imagination of others so that “ you don’t belong so much to you”. I never knew a person could be so inextricably tied to the past and their historic...

Dear Claudia Rankine, You have done a great job projecting your experiences/ the experiences of black people onto the reader, and still maintaining an authentic and powerful tone. I find it interesting that you chose to write your book in a lyrical form rather than a more conventional matter- perhaps this reflects the idea of "life as a rhythm". Especially in the context your experiences, there seems to be a series of parallels and a rather consistent cadence of how exactly racism affects you. I also realized that a lot of the racism you've faced isn't the explicit type of degrading behavior from white people that one would expect- instead it seems that society subtly but very clearly imposes racist and stereotypical thoughts on you. The story about someone calling you the name of their black worker especially rung, as the very fact that the only other black person in her life is regarded as inferior and is yet compared to you just because your racial identity overs...