Thoughts on Citizen

I found Citizen to be an arresting work from the very start- it toys with prose very much like a creative nonfiction work, and very effectively so, to portray a multimodal collage of the Black American experience. Each piece stands out as a powerful story all on its own, but they still seamlessly thread together as a narrative of oppression, quiet and unquiet, which can go unaddressed in the microcosms of the stories but, when lain out on the pages of the book, becomes a list of grievances, a protest in its own right.

One particular passage that stood out to me was the soliloquy on “I” Rankine gives on pages 71 to 73— “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane” (71) is a concise yet powerful analysis of how white and black people differ both as narratives and as people in the public crowd. White people have the power to be an ‘I’, a subject, as expressed through that powerful pronoun. White people control their own stories by getting to speak in first person, navigate and choose in real time. However, Black people in America do not have that luxury, and thus become objects, which we see demonstrated throughout Citizen as we move through anecdotes scripted for us in the second person.  This is eerily reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s work on the gaze (Black Skin, White Masks), and how different gazes (namely the white gaze and the Black gaze) shape our sense of being; in both Black Skin, White Masks and Citizen, the white gaze is shown as the actor, with the black gaze being acted upon.

                We do see an important subversion of this dynamic in the edited lynching photo on page 91. With the brutalized Black subjects erased from the photo, we can no longer put a pitying white gaze on their suffering; instead we are forced to confront the white gazes, casual as they are in the face of grotesque brutality. This ‘flips the script’, and places the burden on white readers to be gazed upon—we are gazing at our own implicit role in a system which used to that particular type of carnage, and even now endorses a new type of public slaughter via execution by cop. It is a quietly powerful statement, a challenge, which I believe defines the tone and dialogue that Citizen lays out for us.