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. The narrator hopes to be bucking the trend of the physical tolls racism imposes by sitting in silence and refusing to engage with racists (p.13). In doing so, they only give themselves permission to say racist things. In Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term John Henryism (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. People, she argues, are only as emotionally vulnerable as they are addressable. When a person in the audience asks Butler why language is capable of hurting people, she answers by saying that the simple act of existing makes people addressable. The book uses primarily the second-person ('you') mode of discourse, and uses. 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. The protagonist attends a lecture by the philosopher and public intellectual Judith Butler. Citizen: An American Lyric is a book-length poem in 12 chapters by award-winning Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine.

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 by Claudia Rankine