Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I didn’t know black women could get cancer, instinctively you take two steps back though all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here.

What is wrong with you? This question gets stuck in your dreams.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?

Before it happened, it had happened and happened. As a black body in the States, your response was necessary if you were to hold on to the fiction that this was an event “wrongfully ordinary,” therefore a snafu within the ordinary.

because white men can’t police their imagination black people are dying