Citizen

 

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poetry and lyrical essays about how the little bits of throw-away racisim build up and magnify over time. "What did you say?" she asks repeatedly in the book. Perhaps the best descriptions of all those little misspoken, subtle prejudices that others dismiss as "joking", a "mistake", or "slip of the tongue" create a tension that those facing it must constantly battle against, and sometimes just can't take any more. This is a book that shows how art (poetry) can say the things that speechifying and lecturing can't.

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John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism.  They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints.  It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence

For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person.  After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language.