![]() ![]() ![]() When I flinched, I knew that was something I should pay special attention to. I actually said aloud to myself at one point, STOP. I wanted to respond, “I’m not like that.” I wanted praise for reading the book, her words. I noticed as I read I kept inserting myself into the stories, something white people do all the time. Even so, Citizen is not an easy book to read. I can never know what it is like to experience racial hatred, and it is my responsibility to educate myself. I am white and have tried to do a lot of reading about race, class, gender-anything that gives me food for thought and challenges me to step into another’s world. This book made me uncomfortable, as it should. There are poems in more traditional forms that are somehow not traditional forms. There are essays and essays-as-poems that also talk about the Black experience, such as ones that focus on Serena Williams and Hurricane Katrina. The book contains brief personal accounts that read as poems. ![]() Rankine’s book is about not just her experience as a Black woman-although it is that as well-but what it’s like to be Black in a racist world, though that is a reductive summary that doesn’t do justice to her words. The only response is a directive: “You should read this.” This is how I feel about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Sometimes I read a book that is so deep it’s hard to put it into words for other people to understand. ![]()
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