Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.

Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?

It is not only that confrontation is headache-producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

This overlap is not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she, her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?—her son wasn’t accepted. You are not sure if you are meant to apologize

Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed.

wants you to know, he’s called the police.

Feeling somewhat responsible for the actions of your neighbor, you clumsily tell your friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard. He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants.

The Alchemy of Race and Rights:

This friend says, as you walk toward her, You are late, you nappy-headed ho.

This person has never before referred to you like this in your presence, never before code-switched in this manner.

She doesn’t, perhaps physically cannot, repeat what s...

she only means to signal the stereotype of “black people time” by employing what she perceives to be “black people language.”

A friend tells you he has seen a photograph of you on the Internet and he wants to know why you look so angry.

Obviously this unsmiling image of you makes him uncomfortable, and he needs you to account for that.

You lean against the sink, a glass of red wine in your hand and then another, thinking in the morning you will go to the gym having slept and slept beyond the residuals of all yesterdays.

your body running off each undesired desired encounter.

He said, I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come.

Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes.

Baldwin says skin color cannot be more important than the human being.

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.

Maybe because home was a hood the officer could not afford,

I was told, after the fingerprinting, to stand naked. I stood naked. It was only then I was instructed to dress, to leave, to walk all those miles back home.

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?

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.

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Homi Bhabha)

The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill.

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

Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence.

You are not sick, you are injured—

you’re not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad— It’s just this, you’re injured.

The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you—

Don’t be ridiculous. None of the other black friends feel that way and how you feel is how you feel even if what you perceive isn’t tied to what is …

so soon we love this world, so soon we are willing to coexist with dust in our eyes.

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce— a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.