Claudia Rankine Racial Equality

Racial inequality has been an issue for The United States for decades. Claudia Rankine makes you realize that racism happens in America, and is not an issue to take lightly. Racism as a social invention in and of itself became a breeding ground for many of the social injustices of today, such as, ethnic profiling, police brutality, sexism, and inequality. Claudia Rankine uses different approaches from her books Citizen, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely to state the struggles against racial disparity, and discrimination. Rankine suggests the end of history is now a waste, our ancestors fought for racial equality, yet we face similar issues today.

Rankine references Dr. Cornel West in her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as West makes the point that hopefulness

They discussed what she does for a living as she describes her job description they got on the subject of how certain Americans feel he’s a terrorist before even talking to him. Pakistani taxi drivers lost out on business, because they were all seen as terrorist after that incident. Rankine, speaks of the space of loneliness, but in a different way. The lonely space must be physically crossed. It is a theorized thinking space transformed into a real, felt space. That is, thinking as if trying to weep. That is why Rankine’s discussion with the Pakistani taxi driver stresses the hypocrisy of terms like parity, and equality. I felt I finally had the tools to address race and the space around what it means to be human, such as our responsibility to society. I feel I need both things. Don't Let Me Be Lonely has an interior register as well, even though the book tries to negotiate questions in the world, it focuses on one's inability to effect change, which is deeply crippling. It's an internal journey that allows you to come back out.

Form has everything to do with content. For instance, the introduction of images in Don't Let Me Be Lonely was an attempt to acknowledge a total experience of being a human in this society, to involve as many of our senses as possible. The prose form allows her to create a tumbling, strangely open narrative that is unified and diverse at once. The poetry component of the form allows vivid imagery. The traditional form of prose has dissolved into an imagistic stream of consciousness, which reflects the narrator’s dissolving sense of