Book Review: Citizen - Claudia Rankine
Updated: Nov 23, 2021
Claudia Rankine's new book discusses racial aggressions in 21st-century daily life and in the media, highlighting the everyday slips of tongue and intentional offenses in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court (think Serena Williams), on the soccer field (think Zinedine Zidane), on TV, on social media, and on blog sites. These everyday slights come at the cost of a person's ability to speak, perform, and generally exist. These offenses - both intentional and not - result from a person's identity and society's collective consciousness of who is and should be accepted. Thus, the identity of an individual defines their addressability in modern society. Using essay, images, and poetry, Citizen describes the individual and collective effects of racism in our "post-race" society.