One of my favorite thing about Citizen is that I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those books whose words scream so loud they can echo in your head for days. It rightfully haunts my wondering thoughts with its heavy, but unignorable, truths of society.
What has really been clouding my mind, though, is something that Claudia Rankine said in an interview we watched in class. In the interview she is speaking about when she visited Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown. A young black man she speaks to says that Michael Brown looked just like him and that that could be him. It struck her, and me, that this man was picturing himself in a dead body. Of course, whenever there is a sudden death, many people say that it could be them. However, there are some very disturbing differences between Michael Brown’s death, and most others: If a drug user dies of an overdose, fellow drug users may realize that it was their own habit that had killed, just as an avid fast food eater may realize when someone they know dies of heart disease, etc.. In cases such as those, these people picture themselves in the dead body because the cause of death was a habit or way of life that they share and something that seems to have some logical reason for its consequence of death. But in Michael Brown’s case, people are relating to his death because they share the same color skin-- something so meaningless; something that should have no consequences at all, let alone one of death.
Just something I was thinking about in class that made my heart heavy.
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