54 pages • 1 hour read
Claudia RankineCitizen: An American Lyric
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Chapter 3 describes a series of ordinary moments in mundane settings—a grocery store, an office, etc.—that highlight the pervasive and subtle power of racial discrimination. These moments are presented in minute detail.
In the first moment, the subject is late for a date with a friend in California: “You are rushing to meet a friend in a distant neighborhood of Santa Monica” (41). After being just a little late, the friend, who is black, refers to the subject as a “nappy-headed ho” (41). The subject guesses as to why her friend might have called her this:
Maybe the content of her statement is irrelevant and she only means to signal the stereotype of ‘black people time’ by employing what she perceives to be ‘black people language.’ Maybe she is jealous of whoever kept you and wants to suggest you are nothing or everything to her. Maybe she wants to have a belated conversation about Don Imus and the women’s basketball team he insulted with this language (42).
Other scenes describe a white co-worker confusing the names of the only two black women who work in the office; a white woman exclaiming that “I didn’t know black women could get cancer” (45); a friend asking why a black woman always “looks so angry” (46); a co-worker asking a black colleague why black professors are “always on sabbatical,” despite the fact that everyone has the same sabbatical schedule (47); a real estate agent who awkwardly announces how comfortable she is around black people (51); a white cashier who questions if a black person’s credit card will work (54).
The final section of this chapter concludes: “Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition” (55).
Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 is a series of prose-poem paragraphs focusing on feeling and on the often painful physical sensation of being black in contemporary America.
Rankine uses sighing as an entry point into the pain of existence: “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets” (59). The subject can’t help but be upset at existence, as it is futile to resist this feeling, and it is also futile to think that being upset will be met with anything but irritation by the larger world. This is an impossible and uncomfortable position. The next passage continues the motif of sighing and breath: “The sigh is the pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation” (60).
The next passage shows how the world responds to the subject; this time, the world tells the subject something about memory: “You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says” (61). Returning to the body, Rankine writes:
To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then. Don’t wear sunglasses in the house, the world says, though they soothe, soothe sight, soothe you (61).
This is proceeded by another brief prose-poem paragraph about the world: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you. It’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day?” (63).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Taken together, Chapters Three and Four function as a kind of call and response: Chapter 3 outlines specific offenses, and Chapter 4 explores the feelings and physical sensations brought on by those recurring and painful experiences.
One of the most jarring elements—and a feature of “post-racial” America—is that racism is still present, but not always overtly so. In Chapter 3, particularly, Rankine describes hurt caused not by avowedly racist opponents but by her own friends and colleagues. For example, when the subject is referred to by one of her friends, in a joking manner, as a “nappy-headed ho” (42), even though the friend in question is black, the narrator is taken aback by this racialized reference: “This person has never before referred to you like this in your presence never before code-switched in this manner. What did you say?” (41) The subject is deeply upset.
The above incident causes a schism in the friendship: “For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture” (42). Rankine shows language as a tool for self-creation and a weapon of self-destruction in a racist context. She discusses philosopher Judith Butler’s idea what makes language capable of causing hurt: “Our very being exposes us to the address of another […] We suffer from the condition of being addressable” (49). Building upon Butler’s notion, the narrator realizes that “language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present” (49).
Another linguistic theme explored in this section is the theme of misunderstanding. Throughout, the subject repeats an exclamation of confusion: “What did you say?” (43). When the subject hears a racist remark, she cannot help but feel disbelief over what she is hearing. One might think that, in a “post-racial” America, that kind of language—and the ideology it symbolizes—should be eliminated from common parlance. The fact that it isn’t shows the degree to which racism can arise through quotidian, everyday interactions.
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