They are strangers, but both have children that have just gotten into prestigious schools. In another scenario, a woman joins another woman for lunch. They see that they are going to have to sit next to the black woman, and the mother, with a sigh offers to sit next to the black woman so that her daughter won't have to. A successful African American woman has taken her seat by the window on the airplane, when a white woman with her child approaches the same row. She hates feeling invisible.Īnother scenario, told in the first person, is offered to the reader. The black girl feels even worse about herself than before. Thinking that she will be nice to the black girl for allowing her to cheat, Mary Catherine tries to compliment her, but it comes out more as a racial slur.

The black girl allows Mary Catherine to cheat off of her. Sister Evelyn, her teacher, also gets a name. She is not given a name in the story, but the white girl that cheats off of her is named Mary Catherine. Initially, the book begins with a young 12-year-old black girl who is attending a Catholic school. Taken as a collective whole, the work exposes the inadequacies that still exist globally, and not just in the U.S., as well as offers a hope for the future. The author writes in a free form, half poem, half prose format, which also includes pictures from current events, historical events, and historical civil rights emblems and paintings. And all the while, they leave it to the protagonist to do the emotional heavy lifting that comes along with such conversations, expecting her to process their problematic comments and move on without a problem.Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine, is a work in progress (it's been updated many times now).

In doing so, they only give themselves permission to say racist things. Indeed, this is possibly why white people frequently speak to her as if they can transcend racism, since they hope she-as a black person-will allow them to stop thinking about such matters. What’s worse, though, is that many of her white acquaintances want her to “account” for their own discomfort when it comes to her cultural positioning, hoping that she will be able to relieve them of whatever qualms they have about either her race, their relationship with her, or perhaps the country’s terrible history of racism. This is emotionally exhausting, since she constantly has to consider the fact that society at large has deeply problematic biases against black people. Again, the protagonist cannot escape racism in her daily life.

Citizen claudia rankine sparknotes