Research On Citizen by Claudia Rankine

John Henryism

In “Citizen: An American Lyric” Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term “John Henryism” (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. 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). Medically, “John Henryism, which was coined by Professor Sherman James of Duke University, [defines] the pressures of systematic racism [which] can harm the body…making it significantly more susceptible to both depression and heart-related disease.” (Roison). Various studies show increases in blood pressures and death rates in African-American men between ages 18-60, particularly those from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hudson).

The reference to John Henryism speaks to more than just the medical facts, which Rankine mentions herself. John Henryism is named for American folk hero John Henry, “a child born destined to be “a steel-driving man.” The child would grow to have Samsonian strength, working his days on the railroads during the Southern Reconstruction period” (UFCW). John Henry is a symbol of strength, of being able to bear the burdens but also a reminder, not to waste your breathe arguing with those who will never listen.

Works Cited:

Hudson, Darrell L, et al. “Racial Discrimination, John Henryism, and Depression Among African Americans.” The Journal of Black Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, June 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4903152/.

“John Henry-Folk Hero.” UFCW Local 324, ufcw324.org/john-henry-folk-hero/.Roisin, Fariha. “John Henryism and the Life-Threatening Stress Affecting Black People in America.” Broadly, VICE, 24 Aug. 2015, broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/qkg537/john-henryism-and-the-life-threatening-stress-affecting-black-people-in-america.

Secondary Source Reports

Tippett, Krista. “Claudia Rankine – How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?” The On Being Project, 10 Jan. 2019, onbeing.org/programs/claudia-rankine-how-can-i-say-this-so-we-can-stay-in-this-car-together-jan2019/.

Thesis:

“Claudia Rankine says that every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. She’s revelatory for me, as a white American, about pain points that are woven into the fabric of the American everyday. She models how it’s possible to bring this out into the open, not in order to fight but in order to draw closer. She shows how we can all do this hour by hour, encounter by encounter, in ordinary times and spaces.” (1-2)

Restated Thesis:

Tippett interviews Rankine about her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, and how she handles the conversation about race, and experiences in everyday life.

Structure:

Krista Tippett interviews Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen: An American Lyric. There is a brief introduction to the book and Rankine’s philosophy about how “all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable” (1). Then the article transitions to a transcript of the interview itself.

The interview begins with background information on Rankine: her teaching credentials, and why her book is seen as an authoritative work. Moving then to her background, Rankine explains how she immigrated from the Caribbean as a child.

The interview then transitions to Rankine’s book, and her goals for Citizen, how “the writing of Citizen was really a project in how do you get language to mark the unmarked?” (4). Rankine discusses the use of language, and the role faith plays in your interactions with people. How racism is still very prevalent, but much less structured in today’s world. Rankine also discusses how she gathered stories from different people, “The examples in Citizen aren’t — some of them are mine, but for the most part, they’re not mine, intentionally, because I didn’t want people to say, “You should get new friends.” (5).

They then discuss specific passages of the book, with Rankine reading: “Do you feel hurt because it’s the ‘all black people look the same’ moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other?’ Thank you. That last line, I have to say, was the hardest line to write in the book, because the original version of that piece was something like — I was trying too hard to come up with the language in my head.” (5-6). They discuss the psychological effect of being “othered”, especially when it is unexpected. The rest of the interview is a discussion of Rankine’s other works, and works she was inspired by.

Rhetorical Strategies:

Rankine phrases the goal of Citizen as figuring out “how can I say this so that we can stay in this car together, and yet explore the things that I want to explore with you?” (2). By this, she means, how do we speak about this difficult, hurtful topic, and still want to continue the conversation with each other when we are finished. This way of rephrasing a difficult to grasp concept or theme can be useful for making sure reading understand what you are trying to get them to understand.
Tippett says to Rankine, “you write about this exhaustion of constantly — not just having the experience, but asking yourself, did he say that? Did I hear that? Did she mean that? Is this racism or not?” (4). The emphasis hear is that racism is not as clear cut as it once was – it isn’t always conscious or intentional, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it just because it is less pointed.
Rankine breaks down the way microaggressions differ from traditional racism, and how is some ways they are more difficult to navigate, clearly sharing where she is coming from before she even speaks about the specifics of her book. “I was interested in this idea that we had entered a new time, and yet, I was seeing the ways that racism — we know about structural racism. We understand how it goes top-down, institutionally, structurally. But when you understand that it’s coming from your friends, your so-called friends, and it’s coming from your colleagues, and it’s so unmarked — so the writing of Citizen was really a project in how do you get language to mark the unmarked?” (4). Rankine emphasizes the particulars of language, and how you must be conscientious of what you say, and how it is said.

Chan, Mary-Jean. “Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 137–63. Cambridge Core, doi:10.1017/S0021875817000457.

Thesis:

“I contend that Citizen is a work that extends the lyric’s possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine’s project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship.” (137)

Restated Thesis:

In Citizen, Rankine uses lyric hybridity (in both double meaning, and multimedia text) to fully express the complexities and intimacies inherent to the subject of race and racial trauma.

Structure:

The article is divided into subheadings, which I will be using.

WHAT ARE POETS FOR IN A RACIST TIME?

CITIZEN AND LYRIC HYBRIDITY

“I argue that Citizen is Rankine’s attempt at creating a poetics of racial trauma which meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals.” (138). Chan begins by explaining how she views Rankine’s book, and ultimate themes, and then going into listing other writers she will use to support her thoughts. She defines “lyric” itself, and how the hybrid nature of a lyric bolsters the hybrid nature of Rankine’s work, as she “refashion[s] the lyric in response to the tribulations of being a black citizen in contemporary America” (139). Chan then goes into a fairly lengthy analysis on Rankine’s use of “you” versus the use of “I’, as “whilst conventional uses of the lyric tend to feature a singular poetic voice at work, Rankine chooses to emphasize the relationality of the lyric “I” vis-à-vis the second or third person in order to accentuate the unequal power relations that exist between racialized bodies” (140).

WHITHER THE RACIALIZED AVANT-GARDE?

CITIZEN AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN HYBRID POETICS

“Citizen is inherently a political work of art given its thematic concerns, yet it is Rankine’s poetics that deserves deeper scrutiny, not least because of its ability to offer incisive commentary on the contemporary politics of American avant- garde poetry. In situating her work among such figures as Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Rankine signals to the reader that Citizen is a book that “extends infinitely into a poetics of politics.” (142). Chan then goes into discussing the politics of Rankine’s book, invoking both Toni Morrison’s arguments for reading literature with full awareness of the way implicit and unconscious racial biases may affect it, and discussing historical events such as church shootings and Brown vs The Board of Education.

Chan also discusses Rankine’s willingness for open discussion of racism, in her own work, as well as the work of others: “Conference, Rankine began an open dialogue with Tony Hoagland, accusing him of expressing racist sentiment in his poem “The Change,” wherein lines such as “I couldn’t help wanting / the white girl,” this “tough European blond,” “to come out on top, / because she was one of my kind, my tribe, / with her pale eyes and thin lips” were juxtaposed with phrases such as “so big and so black,” “big black girl from Alabama” with “cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms.” While “The Change” can perhaps be read sympathetically as a work that serves to reveal the insidious nature of white liberal racism, the problem with the poem remains that it lies too uncomfortably close to racist speech.” (143).

LYRIC “I” OR LYRIC EYE?

RACE, SPECTATORSHIP AND POSITIONALITY IN CITIZEN

Chan summarizes this section better than I could attempt to: “This section seeks to examine how Citizen bears witness to racism and racial trauma, with particular attention to how Rankine reinvents the American lyric to convey an embodied understanding of the way micro-aggressions structure the daily lives of black Americans. In what follows, I shall analyse Rankine’s use of color and visual images in Citizen as a form of social commentary on race and racial dynamics in contemporary America, as well as discuss her adoption of the second-person perspective as a way of exploring how one’s position- ality crucially determines the way one negotiates the world as a racialized being. That Rankine is a poet and scholar from an upper-middle-class background is evident within Citizen, yet one does not feel trapped within her particular experience.” (146).

DID YOU SEE THAT?

REPRESENTATIONS OF RACIAL TRAUMA THROUGH TEXT AND IMAGE

This section discusses the historical trauma of both black and white individuals, and how white anxieties manifest, as “for white individuals, proximity to a black person is therefore likely to trigger a certain cultural trauma that remains entrenched within the nation’s psyche.” (148). Chan analyzes Rankine’s use of artwork to illustrate the sharp contrasts and dependance of white on black.

RACING THE SUBJECT:

“BLACKNESS AS THE SECOND PERSON”

This section analyzes how the use of the second person can cast the reader into different roles in each situation: “The lyric’s focus on subjectivity renders it seemingly ahistorical and decontextualized, yet its usage throughout the centuries by much of Western civilization (beginning with Sappho in Greece and Horace in Rome) points to the fact that the lyric “I” is often assumed to be white unless otherwise stated. This presumption about the speaker’s race (or lack thereof) is of great interest to Rankine, who seeks to reinvent the lyric to allow for the emergence of racialized subjects within Citizen, subtitled “An American Lyric.” Rankine’s lyric essays invoke a multitude of voices and positionings (“I,” “he,” “she,” “they” and “we”) in support of the second-person perspective (“you”), such that the reader can never be sure where to place oneself vis-à-vis the speaker and other cast members, all of whom revolve around one another in a shifting constellation of “linguistic reciprocity patterns.” In an interview, Rankine reveals her intention to rely primarily on the second-person perspective in Citizen as a way to “disallow the reader from knowing immediately how to position themselves” within a particular scenario.” (152-153). “Judith Butler calls for “the decentering of the first-person narrative … to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others.” (154). Rankine is arguing, not just for sympathy, but for empathy, physically putting yourself into another’s situation, which cannot be felt as deeply in the first person narrative.

TOWARDS A POETICS OF RACIAL TRAUMA:

TONE, SYNTAX AND REFERENCE IN CITIZEN

“In an interview, Rankine states that “the scripts in chapter six seemed necessary to Citizen because … I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions … to the creation and enforcement of [racist] laws.” Indeed, Butler notes that the racist is merely a part of the wider apparatus of white power which “operates without a subject, but … constitutes that subject in the course of its operation,” as evidenced by the perpetuation of racism through systems of legal enforcement that routinely police, harass and imprison black bodies.” (155). In this section, Chan analyzes the ways Rankine’s work has implications beyond the personal, into the structural and political, because those individual moments are symptoms of a larger issue.

WHAT POETS ARE FOR IN A RACIST TIME:

“TELL ME A STORY”

“In the last few pages of Citizen, Rankine writes, “I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.” For the longest time, to even speak about racism seemed to run contrary to what we are told as citizens in a multicultural world: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” (159). Chan analyzes what Rankine leaves us with at the end. What do we do with the knowledge Rankine has imparted?

The last words of Citizen are: “it wasn’t a match, it was a lesson”. There are two ways to view this, Chan argues. “Does the speaker imply a lesson learnt by all parties, or simply one which the black body learns over and over, since he/she is always the one who has more to lose?” (159). There is no match, because there is no equality, but is the lesson one of reaching ever closer to equality, or one to widen the gap?

Rhetorical Strategies:

Chan begins with a quote from“then Senator Barack Obama spoke eloquently about the continual plight faced by most African Americans, stating that ‘for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many … who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination … Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.’” (137). This sets up Chan’s position on Rankine’s work, as necessary in today’s political discourse about racism.
“In Citizen, Rankine eschews the use of rhyme and enjambment for a plainer and more prosaic form of lyricism that embodies her search for a form adequate to conveying the particularities of trauma caused by systemic racism in contemporary America.” (139). Chan not only analyzes the language choices Rankine makes, but gives varied explanation and reasoning for it throughout.
“Throughout the book, Rankine is also in conversation with writers, theorists and artists whose inclusion effectively challenges the locus of lyric authority within Citizen, thus situating the text as a lyric hybrid that claims its distinctiveness by worrying “at the boundary between public and private.” (139). Chan uses multiple other authors and works to support her argument, much in the way Rankine integrates many voices and many stories.

Hudson, Jenise, et al. “Interview with Claudia Rankine.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, 2016, pp. 10–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325513.

Thesis:

“We asked Rankine to consider how her perspective on these affective experiences-in particular their impacts on racially marked bodies – gives us a path for interpreting and processing such moments as private individuals and scholars.” (10).

Restated Thesis:

The interview with Rankine focused on how hearing these narrative accounts can give us an avenue to understand instances of microaggression, both personally and academically.

Structure:

Rankine speaks about her work, and the work of others with two interviewers. Rankine discusses how, in general, part of the problem white audiences experience is that racist pasts have not been mourned nor made amends for, instead, they are ignored in a sort of collective amnesia which benefits white people, whether they recognize it or not, and being confronted by the past creates feelings of guilt. Rankine sees Citizen as a way of speaking out, because silence is a sort of “acceptance” (11).

Rankine goes on to explain her use of the term “John Henryism” (11), explaining the burden of people, particularly African-Americans, who have to work twice as hard to achieve the same as someone else, usually a white person. The language she uses is then analyzed. Citizen is not aggression, it is matter of fact, highlighting the way these experiences are no each revelatory moments but small, innocuous things which build until they boil over, but happening every day.

Rhetorical Strategies:

Rankine goes into detail about her use of the term “John Henryism” – a concept almost all people of color are familiar with, even colloquially, even if they are not aware of the term itself. She doesn’t assume this same familiarity for a white audience, and explains the definition and the meaning of the definition.
Rankine uses the philosophies of Brian Stevenson and Martin Luther King Jr. to support the way she analyzes and goes about explaining her views, giving additional authority to what she says.
Hudson and Price preface the interview with a paragraph about who Rankine is, and her credentials, to explain to a possibly unfamiliar audience why it is important or relevant to listen to what she says

Annotated Bibliography

How Does Claudia Rankine’s Citizen Fit With Modern Racial Tensions?

How Does The Use Of The “Lyric” Work To Relate To The Audience?

Primary Sources

Hudson, Jenise, et al. “Interview with Claudia Rankine.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, 2016, pp. 10–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325513.

The interview with Rankine focused on how hearing these narrative accounts can give us an avenue to understand instances of microaggression, both personally and academically. Rankine speaks about her work, and the work of others with two interviewers. Rankine discusses how, in general, part of the problem white audiences experience is that racist pasts have not been mourned nor made amends for, instead, they are ignored in a sort of collective amnesia which benefits white people, whether they recognize it or not, and being confronted by the past creates feelings of guilt. Rankine sees Citizen as a way of speaking out, because silence is a sort of acceptance.

“Citizen: An American Lyric.” NEA, 31 May 2017, https://www.arts.gov/national-initiatives/nea-big-read/citizen-an-american-lyric.

The National Endowment for the Arts collects short reviews of Citizen from multiple papers and websites and also has a collection of photographs and stories for how Citizen has impacted or has been used in personal lives and communities.

Lee, Felicia R. “Claudia Rankine on ‘Citizen’ and Racial Politics.” The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2017. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/books/claudia-rankine-on-citizen-and-racial-politics.html

This New York Times piece is a combination of a review of Citizen, a discussion of Rankine’s other works, an interview, and a commentary on Citizen itself. The main focus of the commentary is how Citizen weaves together the personal and the political, and how Citizen is less focused on intentional activism and is instead a sharing of experience, weaving together what we see on a personal level and the ramifications of microaggressions on a larger scale.

O’Rourke, Kenna . “On Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine.” The Adroit Journal, The Adroit Journal, https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-twelve-kenna-orourke/.

O’Rourke reviews Citizen, emphasizes what she sees as Rankine’s goal, “to articulate the contradictory state of invisibility and hypervisibility, of aggressions and microaggressions”. Her review focuses on Rankine’s use of the second person “you”, forcing the reader into the shoes of a presumably black narrator, faced with relentless indifference, ignorance, and outright aggression. O’Rourke sees Citizen as a recounting of modern racial history, forced to remain in the collective memory, written down so it cannot be dismissed as a thing of the past.

Tippett interviews Rankine about her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, and how she handles the conversation about race, and experiences in everyday life. Rankine discusses the use of language, and the role faith plays in your interactions with people. How racism is still very prevalent, but much less structured in today’s world. Rankine also discusses how she gathered stories from different people. They discuss the psychological effect of being “othered”, especially when it is unexpected. Rankine breaks down the way microaggressions differ from traditional racism, and how is some ways they are more difficult to navigate, clearly sharing where she is coming from before she even speaks about the specifics of her book.

Secondary Sources

In Citizen, Rankine uses lyric hybridity (in both double meaning, and multimedia text) to fully express the complexities and intimacies inherent to the subject of race and racial trauma. Chan begins by explaining how she views Rankine’s book, and ultimate themes, and then going into listing other writers she will use to support her thoughts. She defines “lyric” itself, and how the hybrid nature of a lyric bolsters the hybrid nature of Rankine’s work. Chan analyzes the ways Rankine’s work has implications beyond the personal, into the structural and political, because those individual moments are symptoms of a larger issue.

Tertiary Sources

Pickens, Therí A. “The Verb Is No: Towards a Grammar of Black Women’s Anger.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, 2016, pp. 15–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325514.

Pickens argues for a productive use and reading of anger, specifically black women’s anger, rather than dismissing anger as unhealthy or unproductive. Even when black woman are dismissed or denied or silenced, their anger remains as an anchor of their presence and their refusal to be ignored.

Literature Review

When discussing Citizen by Claudia Rankine, two main topics inevitable arise: the use of the “lyric” or unstructured poetic form, and the experiences of microaggressions and other oppression linked to race experienced by a variety of voices, all linked to this lyric through use of the pronoun “you.” Citizen can be seen as both a commiseration to a black audience, who has lived these experiences, and benefit from having their collective voice be heard, and as a forcing of empathy to a white audience, who have been allowed to claim spectatorship rather than perpetration in many cases.

There are two terms to consider in our analyze of Citizen: microaggression and lyric. Microaggressions are commonly thought of as the new way racism is expressed in the modern day, replacing in many cases, more overt racism. Augie Fleras analyzes microaggressions as a sub-set of racism: “While micro-aggressions may be defined as a kind of everyday racism, the two differ in how they source and process racism…By contrast, the micro-aggression… [emphasizes] …how minorities themselves perceive and define as racism those seemingly banal and unintentional practices of the dominant group members” (Fleras 8). Microaggressions emphasize the perception by the minority group, rather than the intent of the perpetrator. It is possible to participate and benefit from racist systems without being consciously aware of it. The first step to combating this is understanding what a microaggression looks from, for a person who experiences them, which is made visible by the narrative accounts in Citizen.

Where microaggressions may have a clear definition but difficult to identify in the moment, the lyric is easier to understand but harder to clearly define. Scholar Mary Chan states the “lyric continues to defy easy definition and categorization” (Chan 138) and Rankine uses “lyricism that embodies her search for a form adequate to conveying the particularities of trauma caused by systemic racism in contemporary America” (Chan 139). The lyric is easy to identify in Rankine’s work – there is a clear poetic quality to the narratives she tells, especially with the subtitle “An American Lyric” to the book. The lyric’s defining feature is its refusal to adhere to traditional (and traditionally white, and male) poetic forms. The lyric’s uncertain definition follows the uncertain identification of microaggressions in the moment. The uncertainty in the form of the lyric itself mimics the uneasiness of existing asd a black person in America that Rankine seeks to convey.

The critical conversation of Citizen begins with understanding microaggressions themselves, which is the theme tying all of Citizen‘s narratives together. Microaggressions in Rankine’s narratives can be viewed through the lens of “minorities experiencing a racist act (“everyday racism”) versus minorities defining an act as racist (“micro-aggression”) – by isolating those casual expressions of everyday racism (from slurs to slights to offhand comments and clumsy curiosity) that superficially look innocuous enough yet are perceived and processed as racist by members of marginalized groups” (Fleras 8). Fleras emphasizes the importance of the way events are perceived, not the way they are intended, because any intention will have the same result if perceived as offensive or harmful. This focus on how events are perceived is important when many of those who speak out against microaggressions are taught to second guess their own experiences, as Rankine explores. The conversation shifts from microaggressions themselves, to how the lyric form conveys them; “Rankine hints at the power that the white “I” has over the diminished “you” – since to refer to another person simply as “you” is a demeaning form of address: a way of emotionally displacing someone from the security of their own body” (Chan 140). The lyric “you” puts you in the encounter yourself, you must feel the effects of microaggressions. This brings us to the concept of giving voice to those who experience microaggressions, who often also experience “the condition of affective asphyxia, that characterizes black life lived in the precarious state between life and death. I use this concept of affective asphyxia to theorize the ways that black emotional expression is heavily policed, producing a sense of emotional suffocation, whether self-imposed or externally inflicted. Affective asphyxia results from the expectation that black people must choke down the rage, fear, grief, and other emotions that arise when confronted with racism and racial microaggressions” (Jones 38). Rankine’s gives a voice to those often silenced. Just because racism has changed, does not mean it has disappeared, and Rankine forces the confrontation of that fact.

Our intervention into the conversation on Rankine’s Citizen could include other interpretations of the second person “you,” Chan argues the lyric “you” is used to emphasize a power differential, but the lyric “you” also emphasizes how Citizen does not let a reader be a bystander, you must identify with either victim or perpetrator, and you are not allowed the claim of ignorance for how words are intended, because you are forced to confront how they are perceived. One the opposite side of the argument, the lyric “you” could also be a distances mechanism, distancing the experiences, making them universal rather than personal. Another intervention could be a conversation on the concept of Citizenship. The full title is Citizen: An American Lyric. While the lyric is studied and analyzed, the concept of the citizen in Rankine’s book, and the feeling of being “othered” or feeling like a true citizen is barely mentioned.

Works Cited:

Fleras, Augie. “Theorizing Micro-aggressions as Racism 3.0: Shifting the Discourse.” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 48 no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-19. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ces.2016.0011.

Jones, Shermaine M.“I Can’t Breathe!”: Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.” South: a scholarly journal, vol. 50 no. 1, 2017, pp. 37-45. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/701848.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: an American Lyric. Penguin Books, 2014.

Intervention

The baseline of our project comes with understanding microaggressions, what they are and how they’re different from racism, and in bringing microaggressions from an undercurrent, something that influences Citizen and the scholarly work on it, to an “over-current,” something that drives how you read the text. We want our readers to understand that microaggressions are at the forefront of our conversations about Citizen, and not something that is lying in the background. While we’ve found a number of articles and essays who use experienced microaggressions to understand other aspects of Citizen, from the use of lyric-hybridity, to violence against black bodies, none seem to explicitly talk about microaggressions, it is assumed to already to be accepted and understood by the reader. Along with bringing the conversation of microaggressions to the forefront, we will be adding the concept of citizenship to the conversation, which is largely missing from scholarship, despite the title being Citizen. We will collaborate all together to create a website, in order to promote an ongoing conversation about microaggressions, citizenship, language, the black body, etc. Our website will include analyzes of citizenship in Citizen, and how we define bringing microaggressions to an overcurrent in conversation. Our website will mimic a conversation, and each group member will collaborate on various posts and sections.

Project Prototypes

Our group has made a website on wordpress for our collaborative project. It can be found at: https://cemscitizen.wordpress.com, though it is still a work in progress. The main sections are: the home page, analysis and essays, research, behind the scenes (such as author bios, reflections though they are not yet written, etc.) and a directory for alternate access to the drop down menu organization. The writing we have done so far is a mission statement for the website, a discussion on the phrase “it wasn’t a match, it was a lesson”, and an essay on our definition and use of the word “microaggression.” We have placed placeholder posts for analysis we have not written yet, such as the term citizen in the context of Citizen by Claudia Rankine, which is barely discussed in the scholarly community, and its lack strikes us at odd. We are also writing an analysis on the use of Serena Williams in the book, and have made a timeline of the events Rankine points out of Williams’s career.

Changes we have made for prototype two include:

For prototype two, we have overhauled the home page to include a more direct, succinct delivery of our overall thesis, a shorter, catchier home page heading of “unheard voices”, and have added videos of Rankine herself speaking on Citizen to orient reader’s who may not have read the book, or who may have read the book long enough ago that they need reminders.
We have added clearer navigation to the homepage to direct readers where to start and continue through the website. Our mission statement has gotten its own page, and the “meet the authors” section has been combined into one page to introduce us all.
The research section has been completely reorganized to make it clearer that the information is supplementary and mandatory to be read, as well as easier to skim through rather than searching for a specific source. Our directory has been made for every post currently completed.
We have begun dividing completed posts essays with subheadings to make for an easier reading experience of the longer pieces.
We have deemed an analysis of every piece of artwork unnecessary.
To make full use of the multimedia format, we have embedded youtube videos of Claudia Rankine, as well as timelines.
Placeholders in the top navigation bar have been replaced with actual pages with navigation instructions and links, explaining what can be found in each sections dropdown menu in more detail.

For prototype three, we restructured the menu system across the top of the website (Meet the authors moved under Home, added a background information section, replaced Behind the Scenes with Research etc.). We have finished the home page navigation steps and updated the site directory. The analysis essays have all been posted – though they will be tweaked, edited and likely added to throughout the week before the final project is due. Some general cosmetic edits have been made to heading, subheadings, and formatting of some posts, adding “read more” expanders to posts etc.

John Henryism

Secondary Source Reports

Annotated Bibliography

Literature Review

Intervention

Project Prototypes

Reader Interactions

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