Citizen An American Lyric By Claudia Rankine

Perhaps one of the biggest struggles authors encounter when writing their works is ensuring that the arguments they have made are clearly understood and felt by readers. This is especially true when an author writes about a heavy subject, such as that of Citizen: An American Lyric. Throughout this work, Claudia Rankine’s focus is zoned in on racism. She tells stories of encounters with racism, such as rude comments to a group of teenagers. She also speaks about real-life events pertaining to police brutality. These can be tough subjects for readers to wrap their minds around if they have not experienced it first hand. It is evident that Rankine keeps this in mind while writing this work. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine utilizes

The use of the pronoun ‘you’ can be found throughout the work, beginning to end, which cannot be an accident. Rankine begins her work with a second person narration of a racist encounter at school: “... she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person” (Rankine 5). This could be a real experience from a real person or simply a fictional story inserted to make an argument. Either way, the use of ‘you’ makes the reader feel as if they are living the experience rather than reading it. Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling states that “[t]he second-person technique presupposes, or demands, active readers who continually accept or reject their involvement in the story” (Iliopoulou 17). Using second-person narration creates a more personal feel to any story by allowing readers to insert themselves into the story to see, feel, and react to what is happening. In doing so, readers also gain a better understanding of the author’s points and arguments. It is evident that this is Rankine’s intention so that readers can fully grasp, and emotionally connect to, the depths of this topic. In another example, Rankine inserts her own tidbit on first and second-person narration. She writes,“[y]ou said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane” (Rankine 71). There is irony in this line because Rankine utilizes the second-person narration to speak on the power of a first-person pronoun, when, in this work, the second-person pronouns are more powerful. “[T]he first-person perspective is called the perspective of an experiencer … and the second-person perspective is a standpoint of a participant in someone else’s experience” (Pauen, as cited in Rembowska-Płuciennik 69). Since the second-person perspective causes the reader to become a participant in the