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Racism In Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

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Do we think about language when thinking about the origin of racism? We most likely don’t think about it since language and racism do not appear to be correlated. But aren’t they associated? Yes, they are associated in the sense that language itself can take the form of racism. It is essential to acknowledge that language is one of the most influential contributors to racism in order to see the correlation between them. Words have the power to create great things just like they have the power to destroy them. Claudia Rankine uses her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, to illustrate the idea that racism has become an everyday component of our society. This book expresses the idea that language normalizes the existence of racism. This particular …show more content…

The author was describing what people said about Williams when the following was stated: “She is a woman in love, one suggests. She has grown up, another decides, as if responding to the injustice of racism is childish and her previous demonstration of emotion was free-floating and detached from any external actions by others” (Page 35). The words used in the expression “she has grown up” imply that the racism experienced by Williams was not acknowledged as something out of the ordinary since the change in her actions was attributed to her level of maturity rather than to the acts of racism occurred. It is possible to determine that the person who said the expression was most likely a racist individual trying to cover the racism present in this context by placing Serena (obviously the victim) as the perpetuator and the perpetuators as irrelevant to the matter. It is crucial to pay close attention and notice that this is one of the few moments in which Rankine places her own emotion into her writing. Rankine, through her language, emits her anger toward those who said that responding against racism was “childish.” This shows Rankine’s awareness in regards to the normalization of racism and how she is clearly against

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The author presents the readers with different experiences of what occurs in her everyday life. Each example contains racist actions although not drastic it’s subtle enough to be detected by people of color that might be oblivious to white people. These daily racists actions whether intentional or not are micro aggressions meaning that they are instances of racism that are communicated to people of color on a daily basis. The term micro aggression is linked with the text since each piece of text is an example of it that the author, Rankine, has experienced through and multiple people go through.

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In “Slurring Perspectives,” Elisabeth Camp begins with the argument that slurs are “powerful” and “insidious” precisely because they “present contents from a certain perspective, which is difficult to dislodge despite the fact that it is precisely what a nonbigoted hearer most wants to resist.” It is this reason why slurs are considered more offensive than “pure expressives” like “damn,” because they denote certain negative properties which are meant to contain harmful, “truth-conditionally robust properties” (Camp 330). Camp then goes on to say that slurs “conventionally signal a speaker’s allegiance to a derogating perspective on the group identified by the slur’s extension-determining core” (Camp 331). It is this derogating perspective

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This is shown when she says, “…racial caste system do no require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr warned more than forty-five years ago.” (Alexander, 2010, p.14) As mentioned earlier, the one of the central themes of the book is racial aggression even though the “overt racial hostility” does not really exist in the Jim Crow era. People very easily believe in conventional information rather find out if the information is legitimate or not.

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Despite her recurring emphasis on Native Americans in her reading, one must also realize how subjective her writings would be towards the white population. One must not forsake that she is white, which may lead her to feel inclined to have pity towards Native Americans, black Americans, and those of Hispanic

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“She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something...her son wasn’t accepted” (Rankine 13). This quote is interesting to me because it reminds of the case Grutter v. Bollinger, where a white female applicant to the University of Michigan Law School sued the school for violating her Fourteenth Amendment because they denied her admission. She lost in the end, but the ideology that minorities are more easily accepted into schools than whites is still thought and said by some white Americans today. The importance this quote serves to the poem is that the quote is another example of a microaggression that the author wants the reader to understand happens. “She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and

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