Essay Comparing Citizen And Baldwin's Notes Of A Native Son

In Rankins book Citizen and Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son we learn that the books are about the racial differences of the past and present. We learn that in Notes of a Native Son it captures a view on the black life of a father and son at the peak of the civil rights movement. These harsh times allow Baldwin to wonder and doubling back to a state of grace. While in Citizen we learn that our experiences of race are often beginning in the unconsciousness and in the imagination and tangled in words. Rankine shows how dynamic of racial selves are not isolated but also shared.
Rankine exploits and deconstructs what has been called "post-race" society. Her prose asks us to rethink our obligations by probing the definitions of word "citizen." She writes, "to know what you'll sound like is worth noting"(69). She uses second person because it forces the reader to question what it means to be an American, to belong to this country.
The reader will find out that Citizen is artful, open to many interpretations and Rankine lets us view multiple

Rankine writes "You can’t put the past behind you, it’s buried in you; it turned your flesh into its own cupboard" (63). This is explaining how Whites have to live with the past of the pain and suffering that they caused to Blacks. There are still plenty of oppresion and nonaggression that happen today than there was during the time of this lynching photo.
In Notes of a Native son, it tells us about the poor relationship between the father and son but as the story continues one learns that it becomes much more than that. Within the first page Baldwin writes, "It had something to do with his blackness, I think he was very black, with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful"(588). He understands what his father doesn't, he knows that despite being black there is still a beauty within