Citizen An American Lyric Summary

“Citizen: An American Lyric” is a book by Claudia Rankine it details various struggles and happenings happening to African American in the United States. The book is composed as poems in various chapters, while in others she details the struggles of certain people, and in lastly some are short little stories or tragedies that have happened to people in the African American community. The book in the end is just a collection of what Rankine deems important are issues happening to African Americans in the states. Rankine throughout the book seems like she wants us to know exactly what it feels to be as an ethnic person, from small misunderstanding to big and terrible experiences he has written down. Rankine is telling something big to us through …show more content…
Take the cover photo of the book, the hoodie of a jacket mounted to the wall like a hunter's trophy. Its propped up like a head is inside of it, this piece takes a stronger image in this day and age due to the recent increase and knowledge of shootings of african american men. The hoodie raised up is often seen as an image of a young african american man who is suspicious and dangerous. She explores this idea further in chapter 6. The first picture in the book is in chapter 1, it shows a picture of a street sign, the street's name being jim crow. One has to wonder why this street name is still kept up, is it an important street to the community around it, do the people around support the idea of jim crow, are the schools nearby teaching those ideas to their students. There is much let to the imagination with this street sign. If the sign has been there from the jim crow era why hasn't it been removed? One can argue that since it's been there for so long there it doesn't need to be taken down, this can affect african americans in the surrounding community but it won't be taken down since distress to the african american community is seen as invisible …show more content…
This appears to be one of the main themes of the book, that the suffering of the african americans is invisible and unimportant. Suffering and pain of african americans is seen as unimportant and invisible, chapter 7 focuses heavily on these sort of feelings. “ You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless” (Rankine 139). This quote is trying to say that before they grow up and know who they are, they are still invisible and unimportant to everyone else before realizing that themselves. The final page tell us about when she locked eyes with someone parking their care and subsequently moving and parking elsewhere right