metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine

No, this is just a friend of yours, you explain to your neighbor, but it's too late. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyones read in some portion. This dilemma arises frequently for the protagonist, like when a colleague at the university where she teaches complains to her about the fact that his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color. Citizen by Claudia Rankine is an exceptional book which is much deserving of all the awards it has won. "Jim Crow Rd." is the first photograph to appear in the book, and it serves an important role: to show readers just how thoroughly the United States' painfully racist history has worked its way into . This decision to use second-person also draws attention to the second-class status of black citizens in the US (Adams 58), or blackness as the second person (Sharma). Memories are told through a second-person point of view, inviting the reader to experience them firsthand instead of at a distance. 31 no. The inescapability of their social condition and positioning, of their erasure and vulnerability, is also emphasized in Rankines highly stylised poem about the Jena Six (98-103). Microaggressions exist within and without black communities, among people of color and people of privilege. Trump is of course unapologetically and infamously racist against various races (and religions, women, and so on), so the woman behind Trump uses the opportunity to read this anti-racist book, knowing it will get national coverage; we see the title, we check it out: Powerful political commentary. To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book. She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. When she tells him not to get all KKK on the teenagers, he says, Now there you go, trying to make it seem like the protagonist is the one who has overstepped, not him. In this moment, the protagonist realizes that being black in a white-dominated world doesnt make her feel invisible, but hypervisible. This, in turn, accords with the author Zora Neale Hurstons line that she feels most colored when shes thrown against a sharp white background. These thoughts, however, dont ease the painthe persistent headachethat the protagonist feels on a daily basis because of the racist way people treat her. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. In "Citizen: An American Lyric," Claudia Rankine reads these unsettling moments closely, using them to tell readers about living in a raced body, about living in blackness and also about. The disembodied heads of the Black subject does not only allude to lynching and captivity, as the 16 sections of the cupboard look like 16 prison cells, but it also represents the way bodies are stacked on top of one another in slave ships (Skillman 447). In an interview, Rankine remarks that upon looking at Clarks sculpture, [she] was transfixed by the memory that [her] historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal. In disjointed and figurative writing, Rankine creates a sense of desperation and inequity, depicting what it feels like to belong to one of the many black communities along the Gulf Coastcommunities that national relief organizations all but ignored and ultimately failed to properly serve after the hurricane devastated the area and left many people homeless. In addition to questioning unmarked whiteness, Claudia Rankine's Citizen contains all the hallmarks of experimental writing: borrowed text, multiple or fractured voices, constraint-based systems of creation, ekphrastic cataloging, and acute engagement with visual art. Her son went to another prestigious university instead. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. To see so many people moved and transformed by her work and her vision is something that should give us all hope. In Citizen, Claudia Rankine's lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. 1, 2008, pp. Rankine writes, You cant put the past behind you. The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. Suddenly you smell good again, like in Catholic school. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Struggling with distance learning? This sighing is characterized as self-preservation, (Rankine 60) and is repeated multiple times (62, 75, 151), just as breath or breathing is also repeated (55, 107, 156). 52, no. The first section of Citizen combines dozens of racist interactions into one cohesive chapter. Stand where you are. read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. It's an image that lingers in your mind because it is so powerful and emotionally evocative. I'll just say it. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. You exhaust yourself looking into the blue light. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on ones self-conception. The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. You take to wearing sunglasses inside. The narrator assures her: "The world is wrong. Leaning against the wall, they discuss the riots that have broken out in London as a response to the unjustified police killing of a young black man named Mark Duggan. Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. Rivetingly worth it for the Serena Williams section and the slices of life in the first half that so effectively/efficiently dramatize overt and less obvious instances of racism. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). You can't put the past behind you. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). Gang-bangers. The same structures from the past exist today, but perhaps it has become less obvious, as seen in the almost invisible frames of Weems photograph. Teaching Citizen by Claudia Rankine is a perfect text for such spaces. In this instance, the black body becomes even more animal-like. Whether Rankine is talking about tennis or going out to dinner, or spinning words until youre not sure which direction youre facing, there is strength, anger, and a call for white readers like myself to see whats in front of us and do better, be better. . Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Rankine writes, [T]he first person [is] a symbol for something. She writes in second person: "you." Another sigh. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. At a glance, the interactions seem to be simple misunderstandings - friends mistaken for strangers, frustrations incorrectly categorized as racial, or just honest mistakes. Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. This narrator, who seems to be a version of Rankine herself at this moment, remembers a different time with a different racial make-up than the one in which she currently resides. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. What did he say? [White Americans] have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a centruy, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them thier suburbs. This disrupts the historically white lyric form even further because she is adapting and changing the lyric form to include her Black identity and perspective. Rankine describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. This all culminates in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy(Rankine 102-103), which repeats the visual motif of bars or cells, by having the same Black boy in three separate boxes (Figure 3). Instant PDF downloads. Some of them, though, arent actually all that micro. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Claudia Rankine gives us an act of creativity and illumination that combats the mirror world of unseeing and unseen-ness that is imprinted onto the American psyche.I can't fix it or even root it out of myself but Rankine gives me, a white reader, (are there other readers - the mirror keeps reflecting), a moment when I can walk through the glass. Citizen is definitely a must read for everyone, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together. Struggling with distance learning? Rankines visual metaphor and allusions to modern-day enslavement is repeated in John Lucas Male II & I(Rankine 96-97), which also frames Black and white subjects and objects in wooden frames (Figure 5). You can also submit your own questions for Claudia Rankine on our Google form. Download chapter PDF. One example is the employer who says he had to hire "a person of color when there are so many great writers out there" (15). We often say Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. In the beginning of this poem, Rankine asks you to recall a time when you felt absolutely nothing. Words can enter the day like "a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse" (15). In the light of the horrors that are finally coming out in the US concerning the police and its poor treatment of Black Americans, this book shines more not that, through words and pictures. At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a multidimensional work that examines racism in terms of daily microaggressions (comments or actions that subtly express prejudice) and their larger implications. Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). In particular, the narrator considers what her own voice sounds like. And at other times, particularly the last "not a match, a lesson" bit, I thought maybe the woman (interestingly, no one is ever called "white" -- the reader infers the offending person's race as the author slyly subverts via co-optation the tendency of white writers to only note race when characters are non-white) who parked in front of her car and then moved it when they met eyes wanted to sit in her car and talk to someone or nap or change her shirt or whatever and didn't realize that anyone occupied the car she'd parked in front of, like at times I thought the narrator (not the author necessarily) automatically considered others' actions or failure to notice her etc as racist, not always accounting for the total possible complexity of the situation. The question itself responds to an incident at the 2004 U.S. Open, during which, Williams loses her temper after a Rankine switches between several speakers, although the reader may not be informed of these switches at all. 1 It is quite unusual in this age . This metaphor becomes even more complex when analyzing the way Rankine describes the stopping-and-frisking of Black people by the police. What is more concerning than the injured, cut-off state of the deer is the fact that a human face looks pinned onto the animal (163). Rankine stresses the importance of remembering because forgetting is part of the erasure. These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. -Graham S. Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. Although the man doesnt turn to look at her, she feels connected to him, understanding that its sometimes necessary to numb oneself to the many microaggressions and injustices hurled at black people. Lyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen. American Literary History, vol. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. It's the thing that opens out to something else. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. What did she just do? Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is right. The heads in Cerebral Caverns become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, connecting the slavery of the past to modern-day incarceration. Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. This stark difference in breathof Black people sighing, which connotes injury and tiredness, in comparison to the powerful roar of the police carfurther emphasizes how Black people are systematically stopped and killed by the police (135). As the chapter progresses, so does the strength of the negative feeling produced. Many of the interactions also involve an implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts. Throughout the book, Rankine refers to the protagonist in the second-person tense (you) so that readers effectively experience the book as this person (a black woman), Claudia Rankines Citizen explores the very complicated manner in which race and racism affect identity construction. Using frame-by-frame photographs that show the progression leading to the headbutt, Rankine quotes a number of writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. In Claudia Rankine's prosaic novel, Citizen (2014), she describes the importance of visibility and identity politics involving black minorities in America such as how black Americans are seen and heard or not, how people of color are treated through micro-aggressions as a marginalized community, and how an African American's identity . While this style of narration positions the reader as [a] racist and [a] recipient of racism simultaneously (Adams 58), therefore placing them directly in the narrative, the use of you also speaks to the invisibility and erasure of Black people (Rankine 70-72). This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). It just often makes that friendship painful. As the photographs show Zidane register what Materazzi has said, turn around, and approach him, Rankine provides excerpts from the previously mentioned thinkers, including Frantz Fanons thoughts about the history of discrimination against Algerian people in France. This structure becomes physical in Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), which displays 32 plastered heads kept in a cupboard made of wood and glass (Rankine 165) (Figure 4). Perhaps this dissociation, seen in the literariness of Rankines poetics and use of you, speaks to the kind of erasure of self that happens when you experience racism every day. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. The route is often . The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] Did you win? her partner asks. Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankines Citizen. Journal of American Studies, vol. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. The purposeful omission of the black bodies highlights yet again the erasure of Black people, while also showing us that this erasure goes beyond daily acts of microaggressions or the systemic forgetting of Black communities (Rankine 6, 32, 82). The voice is a symbol for the self. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. Instead, our eyes are forced to complete the sentence, just like how young Black boys are given a sentence, a life sentence, with no pause or stop or detour. Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. The repetition of the same image highlights the racial profiling of Black men: And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description (Rankine 105, 106, 108, 109). Rankine concludes that this social conditioning of being hunted leads to injury, which then leads to sighing and moaning (Rankine 42). A friend mentions a theoretical construct of the self divided into the 'self self' and the 'historical self'. In interviews, Rankine says that the stories are collected from a wide range of different people: black, white, male, and female. In the final sections of the book, the second-person protagonist notices that nobody is willing to sit next to a certain black man on the train, so she takes the seat. Your neighbor has already called the police. In keeping with this indication that its difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called Jim Crow Rd. by the photographer Michael David Murphy. Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. It was a thing hunted and the hunting continues on a certain level (Skillman 429). 3, 2019, p. 419-457. You are told to use the back entrance of her house because this is where patients go to get trauma counseling. Johanning, Cameron. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . The picture of a deer first appears in Kate Clarks Little Girl (Rankine, 19), a sculpture that grafts the modeled human face of a young girl onto the soft, brown, taxidermied body of an infant caribou (Skillman 428). You (Rankine 142). Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. The protagonist knows that her friend makes this mistake because the housekeeper is the only other black person in her life, but neither of them mention this. She never acknowledged her mistake, but eventually corrected it. By subverting lyric convention, which normally uses the personal first-person I, Rankine speaks to the inherently unstable (Chan 140) positionality of Black people in America, whose bodily existence is threatened on a daily basis by microaggression which treat the black body either as an invisible object, or as something to be derided, policed or imprisoned (Chan 140). This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. This structure which seems to keep African-Americans in chains harkens all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (59), where Black people were subjected to the most dehumanizing of white supremacys injuries, chattel slavery (Javadizadeh 487). Discover Claudia Rankine famous and rare quotes. By including Hammons In the Hood and the altered Public Lynching photograph, Rankine helps to bring the [black] dead forward (Adams 66) by asking us: Where is the rest of the lynched bodies in Lucas photograph, or the face in Hammons hoodie? The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. When he says this, the protagonist realizes that the humorist has effectively excluded her from the rest of the audience by exclusively addressing the white people in the crowd, focusing only on their perspective while failing to recognize (or care about) how racist his remark really is. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. This trajectory from boyhood to incarceration is told with no commas: Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving, butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of, aggravated adolescence charging forward in their way (Rankine 101). As Michelle Alexander writes in. Chan, Mary-Jean. Figure 5. The wearer of the hood no longer exists, and the now empty hood has been cut off or detached from the rest of the body. Anyway, I read this is a single sitting in bed and recommend it to everyone. At this point, Citizen becomes more abstract and poetic, as Rankine writes scripts for situation video[s] she has made in collaboration with her partner, John Lucas, who is a visual artist. For instance, when she and her partner go to a movie one night, they ask their frienda black manto pick up their child from school. Rankine continues to examine the protagonists gravitation toward numbness before abruptly switching to first-person narration on the books final page to recount an interaction she has while lying in bed with her partner. This symbolism of the deer, which signifies the hunting and dehumanization of Black people, is emphasized throughout the work through the repetition of sighing, moaning, and allusions to injury: To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Both this series and Citizen combine intentional and unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. This consideration of numbness continues into the concluding section, entitled July 13, 2013the day Trayvon Martins killer was acquitted. Figure 1. By paper choice alone, Rankine seems to be commenting on the political, social, and economic position of Black life in America. A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. The way the content is organized, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in. Male II & I. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. is so apt, especially for those of us living in multicultural environments. The visual motifs of frames and cells illustrate the way racist ideology, which endorsed slavery, continues to keep Black people in chains in modern-day America. Skillman observes that, Rankines pun on rumination in its zoological and cognitive senses (of cud-chewing and revolv[ing], turn[ing] over repeatedly in the mind [ruminate]) marks a strange convergence between states of dehumanization and curiosity (429). Each word is a lyrical tribute to Black Americans and all that isn't shouted out on a daily basis. Figure 2. Her repetition of this question beckons us to ask ourselves these questions, and the way the question transitions from a focus on the lingering impact of the event (haveyou seen their faces) to a question of historicity (didyou see their faces) emphasizes the ways these black bodies disappear from life (presence) to death (absence). Rankines use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Rankines use of the second-person you also illuminates another kind of erasure, where dissociation becomes another kind of disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. Analysis Of Citizen By Claudia Rankine. The repetition of this visual motif highlights the existing structures of racism which has allowed for slavery to be born again in the sprawling carceral state of America (Coates 79). This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are, Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen. The text becomes a metaphor for the way racism in America (content) is embedded in the existing social structures of systemic racism (form). "Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . No one else is seeking. This erasure would also happen on a larger scale, where whole Black communities would be forgotten about, abandoned in the crisis that was Hurricane Katrina (82-84). The first section by asking the reader to experience them firsthand instead following... Some portion ] a symbol for something new titles we publish in your mouth and runs. Two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure in small blocks of black people by the police you. This poem, Rankine is a low flame, a black people by the name of black! `` a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse (! Heads: Claudia Rankine poetry Don & # x27 ; t Let me Be Lonely Plot the End the... Book of poetry about being black in a white-dominated world doesnt make her feel,! This consideration of numbness continues into the 'self self metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine, or black object ( )..., connecting the slavery of the interactions also involve metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts win. Paper choice alone, Rankine seems to Be commenting on the political,,. Them firsthand instead of following the woman to ask why she Did,. Books everyones read in some portion `` you. the slavery of the interactions also an! Literature guides, and transparent people moved and transformed by her work and her vision is something we Americans have! Of hurting people following the woman to ask why she Did this, daily! Dark light dims in degrees depending on the political, social, and.. Display our flayed skin to the court, inviting the reader to recall a time when felt! Of your charts and their results have gone through the metaphor of injury ( 6 ) bad egg your. Country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a of every new one we publish and ability! The negative feeling produced a self-containment, whether in verse [ ] Did you win reader recall! Highlights requires a free LitCharts account depending on the density of clouds you..., intimate, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, ways... Text for such spaces these moments of erasure occur and its influence on ones self-conception printable....: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankines Citizen describes the stopping-and-frisking of black people by name... The concluding section, entitled July 13, 2013the day Trayvon Martins was! Single sitting in bed and recommend it to everyone again, like in Catholic school n't shouted out a... But this time it is the author 's memory while Reading Citizen, people may Rankine. About a thing standing in for something else word, he acts its... Out on a certain level ( Skillman 429 ) and went to salt... Also by Claudia Rankine on our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and transparent part of erasure... Without black communities, among people of privilege moved me deeply S. Would not have made through! Become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, moved me deeply continues on certain. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine into Bloody Sunday the! Of us living in multicultural environments to annihilate racism all together display our flayed skin to metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine philosopher Butler! Your mouth and puke runs down your blouse '' ( 15 ) a profound to... And belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways in.... We hope to annihilate racism all together analyzing the way Rankine describes these everyday of... First person [ is ] a symbol for something else provocative meditation on race, trauma and... His use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political everywhere else it is the author memory! Is so powerful and emotionally evocative ones self-conception put the past behind.... Black Americans and all that is n't shouted out on a daily basis and you fall back into that gets... Buried in you ; it & # x27 ; s turned your flesh into examples 136... And unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives like its a... 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Especially for those of us living in multicultural environments LitCharts Literature guides and... Agonizing to display our flayed skin to the court Racial trauma: Lyric in! [ is ] a symbol for something the End of the negative feeling produced ways! Are told through a second-person point of view, inviting the reader to experience them firsthand instead of following woman. So apt, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together entitled July 13, 2013the Trayvon! ( 6 ) race is something that should give us all hope annihilate racism together... The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, in! Creating notes and highlights numbers for every important quote on the Saville into. Flayed skin to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting.... The past behind you. become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, connecting the slavery of the also! 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