Similarities Between Claudia Rankine And Frederick Douglass

“Citizen” by Claudia Rankine and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative are both two amazing books that tells their story from their point of view. Throughout their stories, they explain their life experiences and what they’ve been through. Although “Citizen” and “Frederick Douglass’s Narrative” may be similar in many ways, their differences outweigh each other. In the book Citizen, identity played a huge role. Claudia Rankine believed that whiteness was on top and blackness was on the bottom. Identities were based upon physical contexts such as, skin color or hair texture. She states that when a couple of black teens are playing around in a Starbucks they are considered as niggers. On the other hand, identity also played a role in Frederick Douglass’s

She explains how a neighbor calls the police on the man babysitting because he looks like a loiterer or a thief, when in reality he was just a friend (15). This misjudgment was based on negative unjustified stereotypes.

However in Frederick Douglass’s narrative, he was seen as just a slave with no education. As said by Frederick Douglass, a slave was supposed to know nothing but to obey his master (20). Frederick Douglass was just the opposite of that. He taught himself how to read and write with some help from others because he knew once he could do these things he’d be a free man, not a slave. He believed he was a slave in body but not in mind. Sometimes struggling is a way to find yourself. “You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all it’s intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus,” she says. Different people from different backgrounds view things from a different perspective, everything seems to be invisible until you can see, hear, and feel what someone else does. Throughout “Citizen,” Claudia Rankine felt pain through her personal sorrow. She says, “the past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow,” which means as long as a black person is associated even in the most tedious manner with slavery, they will