Why Brooklyn 99 is Meaningful

If Aristotle defines a comedy as any entertainment form that has a happy ending, I think that many, if not all, comedies have the ability to contribute meaningful insights on human existence.

Brooklyn 99 is a comedic television show about a group of detectives in New York who solve cases together. It's very lighthearted, and constantly makes silly jokes within the group of detective friends. It follows their friendships as they go through new changes in their lives, like when they have children, get married, and go through heartbreaks.

Although Brooklyn 99 makes hilarious lighthearted content, it also makes serious points about racism and homophobia. For example, one detective named Terry Jeffords gets stopped by a white police officer for being black. He tried to explain to the officer that he was a detective himself, and he wasn't doing anything wrong, but the officer wouldn't listen to him. Terry tried to have a sit down conversation with the unapologetic white officer about how it's wrong to stop black people if they are not clearly doing something against the law.

This brought up the issue about how racism sadly plays a major role in who gets arrested or not. Even though the episode was able to make you laugh, it made you more aware of the realities of racism today's society.

Captain Holt is the detective's boss and is a African American, openly gay man. Although, his sexuality and race doesn't define his character. He is a highly intelligent, no-nonsense man who is respected and loved at his job. But, Holt explains in episode how he wasn't always respected at work. He talks about how he constantly faced professional roadblocks because of the homophobia and racism in the 70's and 80's. Despite the fact that he had lots of experience in his field of work, he was often disrespected by, and excluded from the other white, straight males at work.

This makes the audience more aware of how homophobia plays a role in our society, and how someone's sexuality doesn't define their characteristics. The show still makes you laugh at the silly jokes the characters often make, but it brings your attention to serious issues that still play a role in American society today.

Brooklyn 99 has a happy ending in each of its shows, but that doesn't mean that it can't enforce and analyze important, meaningful issues within the show and its characters. A happy ending doesn't necessary hide the depth of each character and their struggles, but it merely reveals meaningful insights to its audience while still making them laugh and keeping their attention. I think a comedy can be even more meaningful than a tragedy sometimes, because it doesn't dwell on depression, but rather presents both the joy and sadness of life in a hilarious, captivating way.

Key and Peele: the magic in satirical comedies

In this comedic sketch by Key and Peele, the 2 actors present the scenario of a white cop pulling over a black man. The scene begins with the police officer pulling over the driver, and asking him some questions. He then tells the driver to open his trunk and step out of the vehicle. The officer "finds" some drugs in the trunk, though he really just planted them there, which upsets the driver. The cop then pushes him up against the car and begins to show the driver a bunch of random magic tricks, which confuses and frustrates the driver. The sketch ends on a bit lighter note, where the driver thinks that the cop is handing him a ticket, whereas he's giving him a ticket to his magic show, in which the driver declines and says he'll take the ticket instead.

In this sketch, the prominent and probably only satirical technique that's used is situational irony. When the officer approaches the black man and forces him to exit his car, you can only assume the worse will happen, as the typical representation of this situation would end with the black man assaulted or murdered. Instead, when the cop pulls out the drugs that he planted in the drivers car, he then magically turns the drugs into roses, instead of punishing the man. The cop performs many other unorthodox actions, such as pulling out a multi-colored string of bandana's, turning a gun into a dove, and performing a card trick. The only time he's seen showing practical instances for this type of scenario is when he pushes him against the car, and even then it doesn't show for much. Finally, the officer ends the excitement with giving him a thought-to-be ticket, but instead of two-for-one coup to his magic show, another clear example of situational irony.

The first, and obvious criticism of society in this sketch is the treatment of black men. Black men are usually depicted as being pulled over by white cops for no reason, and harassed for an even lesser reason. Key and Peele, however, use their humor to emphasize the play-by-play of these situations. In this scene, the cop hits the driver with random magic tricks, which in reality represents the ridiculous and unnecessary questions and actions that white cops perform on black man during these types of situations. Also, when the driver asked the cop a serious and relevant question, the cop would either ignore or blow off the question. For example, when the driver asked if the officer was a real officer, he just shouted "freeze!", and pulled out a gun that he planted on the driver. Ultimately, this shows how white cops think they have the privilege of creating unnecessary and unprovoked conflict when dealing with black men, but also proposes a solution of just leaving the situation alone, which is shown through the cop offering the driver a coupon to his magic show, rather than a ticket.

What do White People ACTUALLY Know About Black People?

The thing about a book like Citizen is that in theory is a nice book. But in actuality it isn’t. The book give a light glimpse of black life. It it only feeds into the one negative the black women live this side life filled with filled with racial adversity. And as a black women, I believe I can say we are more than this. What about your first love? Your first heartbreak? First swim of the summer? Failing a test? All of this thing make up a person and I do not believe this book helps capture this much need picture. Growing up I never saw this images of black women.

This thought bring up one question for me, What do non-black people actually know about black people? The answer to that is very little if anything. The one lens they are shown in classrooms and in the media is a stereotypical. Black people are never aloud to be well rounded characters. Instead they are the butt of jokes about how "ghetto", that character is. Where are the black girl next door characters? Where are the dark skin black characters? Where are the 'strong black leades' (as Netflix calls them)? What lacks is lacking in Citizen is the ability for black people to be who they are, people.

This is America-Citizen

When we first began reading Citizen, the first connection that came to my mind while reading Citizen was the music video and song “This is America”, by Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover. They are told in very different ways, one in rap and one in literature, but both have the same point. They both expose the main issues of race in America that are always talked about as these main issues and are so obvious to people who are actually recognizing what is going on, but nothing ever happens to change these things. Gambino's song is a fantastic song and his words have a very deep meaning, but the music video is what really conveys what he is trying to get to people. Gambino uses very graphic images and scenes in his video that make you as a listener and watcher, be like "damn", but the reality is that is what the reality in America is when it comes to civil rights. It is always talked about how racism in this country is one of its worst flaws, which is a fact, but things like black violence in poor communities to each other, police brutality and other terrible things continue to carry on, and America just keeps on singing. This relates directly to Citizen because it is another example of someone speaking out and actually getting down and sharing the facts of what goes on in this country.

Documentary and Citizen

Considering everything that’s going on with our school right now, I was forced to think of the documentary while reading parts one and two. While watching the documentary I found myself in periods of shock when hearing about some of the black student’s experiences. I also experienced this while reading.

The one story about her walking to her therapist’s office for the first time really struck me. I just couldn’t understand how a professional environment could make such a ridiculous, and racist mistake. The person on the house didn’t even think twice about what they were doing. Even though they eventually apologized for the mistake, it is clear they did not learn what they needed to and they are likely to do the same thing again. I also thought about how this person could live the rest of their life, never being bothered by this situation. But I cannot begin to imagine what repeated activity like this might do to a person of color.

This passage and the many others in the book made me so angry and confused. Living the privileged life I do, I am not forced to see these instances. Therefore, I have begun to believe that we as a society are improving in this department. I was sadly mistaken. I know I will learn a lot from this book as well as the documentary. I am disappointed in myself for believing that things were better than they are, and for not attempting to learn more about the reality of racism in our society today.

Citizen and the Death of Eric Morse

While reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine, I was reminded of my first experience reading about race and understanding the complexities of racism in America. In eighth grade, I was introduced to the story of Eric Morse. At the age of five, he was pushed out of the Ida B. Wells projects by two young boys. When reading about the story and the book Our America, I found the most disturbing aspect to be the environment of the projects of Chicago. Violence was normalized to such an extreme, it was like the children there were surrounded by poison and were expected to suck it up and deal. The themes Rankine discusses in her book, particularly the way in which African Americans are invisible, applies to the projects of Chicago in the 90’s. If an entire neighborhood of white people were subject to the level of violence in Ida B. Wells, I feel like it would have been a much bigger issue. There would have been a stronger public outrage, but because this horrible incident occurred in an almost entirely black neighborhood, people tended to turn the other way. Almost as if this community and the family of Eric Morse were invisible. There was most definitely a strong public reaction, because this death involved such young children. But after the initial histeria, very little was done to fix the situation within the projects. No one looked at the community the young boys were living in and took concrete action to improve it.

How Rankine’s Ideas in “Citizen” are Presented in the Podcast "Serial"

Throughout Claudia Rankine’s novel, “Citizen: and American Lyric”, she presents the reader with everyday microaggressions that she faces as a black individual in America. The podcast Serial presents these same microaggressions and the effects of them in terms of a larger system: The criminal courts of America.

Sara Koenig explores the deep-seeded racial prejudice in our judicial system, from judges, to lawyers, to defendants. The “code-switching” that Claudia Rankine speaks on in her novel is reflected through the language of judge Gaul in the podcast. Gaul regularly refers to, “baby-daddys”  and assumes a fatherless past of many of the defendants that enter his court. His rulings reflect his views and he consistently makes suggestions of punishments that are blatantly unconstitutional. He often employs the threat of jail if the defendant decides to have another child, assuming that the defendant will leave the child eventually. He then puts them under probation, securing an omnipresent white gaze over their black body.

Rankine explores other ways in which black people are defined by the white spaces that they often inhabit. This takes form in the criminal justice building in the podcast Serial, and the way that prosecutorial staffs operate in the building. Prosecutors often employ certain tactics to prevent a change in the system. Specific charges that prosecutors pursue discourage defendants from suing the state if they believe that they have been wrongfully convicted, but instead encourages taking a plea deal. The podcast details how taking a plea is seen as a victory in the courts even if the defendant did not commit the crime in question. The prosecutors also employ racially charged language that raises specific racial perceptions of African Americans to try and influence a jury. Phrases such as, “reached towards his waistband” reinforce ideas about African Americans being dangerous and threatening officers, therefore justifying the police officer’s actions of force that are presented in the show.

Both the novel and the podcast then continue the conversation about race through art. Rankine has a series of art pieces throughout the book that support the ideas written about in the text. Similarly, the podcast uses art to redefine the spaces that are spoken about throughout the show. On their website, www.serialpodcast.org, they digitally recreate the spaces in the show with art added onto the building, redefining the spaces. Often times these were spaces that were largely defined by a white presence, but through the addition of art, the spaces are transformed into critiques of the spaces and beautiful representations of injustice in our country.

Claudia Rankine’s depictions of microaggressions provide a close-up view of daily life for many African-Americans. Though these experiences can seem small and contained to the individual, Serial provides examples of how these microaggressions can sneak their way into our institutions, and result in macro consequences.

Getting to the Point

Citizen describes an incident in which a white man overlooked the narrator (a black woman) in a drugstore (pg.77). The passage itself was interesting to me because I am not totally sure if the events described are racially motivated or not. I feel that in some ways this reflects much of the Black experience because a key component of racism is erasure, or making Black people feel that their experiences aren’t valid or even real sometimes. The ambiguity of the scene itself speaks to that I believe.

Our in class discussion was interesting to me because of what I perceived from many students as a distinct unwillingness to accept that it could have been racially motivated or the idea that if the literal events weren’t racially motivated there wasn’t a “point”. I think that Citizen should be evaluated a work of literature. If we as English students can accept without question the at times dubious symbolism of every 19th and 20th century white author as fact, why must we challenge the symbolism when it comes to Claudia Rankine? To me in some ways this discussion was a reminder of the subtle erasure that I think is the “point” of the passage.

Not Your Job

“Memory is a tough place. You were there” (Rankine, 64).

This is nothing new to you. You’ve seen this before. You’ve breathed this before. You’ve felt that. And that. And everything they think you haven’t. You have.

You wish it was different. You know that that is just your excuse. For what?

Inaction. Passivity. Willful ignorance.

Funny. That reminds you of “Willful Obstruction.” Obstruction of what? Beyond police officers, perhaps those around you are willfully obstructing justice. There are no innocent bystanders. Silence isn't simple. "Willful Obstruction." Isn't that a felony? How would you know?

You know.

What even is a felony? What applies to your brothers and sisters might mean nothing more than a warning to the girl in your math class.

You know this. Your TV knows it. Your eyes and ears and mouth and hands and toes know it. Your memory knows itself. Your memory's job is essentially to never forget. It’s a trap, a prison. The whole damn thing.

And no, for God’s sake, you don’t want to read about it and talk about it over and over with people who don’t actually care to acknowledge that your life is real and valid. Your life -- and your experiences. Of course, that’s what you meant. You sometimes forget that people don't always see the correlation. You’re sorry you didn’t clarify.

Reading and rereading your experiences is like the universe giving power to your memory. Don’t they know how hard you’ve worked to move forward from that, rather than backward? You know they do, and you know they also do not at the same time. You know they don’t understand that concept, and you know that you won’t ever be able to get them to understand it. Understand you.

You.

You’re here. You were there, but you're still there. You're here. You’re real. Tell yourself over and over. What happened was real. What’s happening is real. Don’t they know? No. And it isn’t your job to teach them.

Who is to blame for racism in the United States

I am not here to point a finger at any particular person our group, and trust me there are many people to blame for racist beliefs that have ran through America since it was formed. In my eyes racism is never going to end until we stop pointing fingers, and come together as a whole.

A song and video that has stuck with me since it came out last year was ¨I´m not Racist¨ by Joyner Lucas. If you have heard the song, I hope you were as moved by it as I was, and if you haven´t heard it then you really should give it a listen (and watch). Half of the 7 minute song is a racist white man wearing a MAGA hat spitting racial slurs left and right at a young black man who just sits there and listens. Then the white man stops and give the black man a chance to say his side of the story. After about 3 minutes of the black man saying his perspective on racism and culture and America, the two come together and hug it out vouching to understand each others side and work together to end racism.

I think the message of the song is the answer to stop racism in America. People on both sides need to stop blaming the other, and everyone needs to come together as a group. If each side feels attacked by the other then there will never be progress.

Orientalism

In today's society an orientalist mindset is common. I think that the binary and power dynamic of Us vs them is natural no matter where you live. It is natural to consider your social group the superior one. Thus, without a good understanding of the "east" or the "other" in any instance-without mutual recognition- misunderstanding, even injustice, takes place. For instance, I have never been east of the east coast of the United States and for most Americans the "east" isn't as popular a travel destination as Europe or other states. This allows the media to take advantage of people's lack of knowledge and create entertainment that feeds off of people's willingness to believe that they are the "normal" or the "civilized." Movies such as Aladdin and Doctor Strange present the "east" as a mystery, as a place with unique powers only used for good when a western hero arrives.

I think that "The God of Small Things" is written for a "western" audience to create mutual recognition and empathy with the experiences of those of a different culture. However, I think that it also emphasizes the injustices that people everywhere are familiar with. Issues of social class, police brutality, and domestic abuse force the reader to consider classism, racism and sexism, mostly from the innocent point of view of children. Roy says in the "The God of Small Things", "[the violence of the police was] impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear- civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness." These fears are seen in every society, but manifest themselves in different ways. I think by understanding this we can take a step away from the orientalist mindset.

Blackbird

"Blackbird" by the Beatles is from their album The Beatles, or The White Album which came out in 1968. Paul McCartney performed it and later claimed that the Civil Rights Movement inspired the lyrics. McCartney also used Johann Sebastian Bach's piece, "Bourree in E minor" throughout the song.

McCartney employs positive verbs paired with negative nouns in order to show the experience of using what you have for good and turning around the disappointments in life.  For instance, he uses joyful verbs like "singing" but places them in "the dead of night" which seems like an odd, dark place to be singing. Then, he describes "broken wings" but says to nevertheless, "learn to fly." He repeats this significant phrase but in a slightly different context, using "sunken eyes" and "learn to see." He attempts to communicate the desire to do the best with what you have and to redeem negative aspects of your life by thriving in spite of them.

Furthermore, McCartney uses antonyms and contradictory words in the same phrase to emphasize a shift that occurs throughout the song: taking bad things and making them good. He sings, "Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly/ into the light of the dark black night" twice. Clearly, there is some light in the dark black night. What is this light? Where does it come from? This juxtaposition in his diction clearly shows how McCartney is saying that there is always something benevolent in an unfortunate situation or a mean person.

In addition, the poem shifts point of view, pointing to the possibility of symbolism. The speaker starts out describing a scene about a blackbird. The first few lines are easy to take literally as the blackbird has broken wings and can fly. However, McCartney then shifts to second person when he states, "All your life/ You were only waiting for this moment to arise." Does McCartney start talking to the blackbird? Or, is the audience now being compared to the blackbird? Or, has the audience been the blackbird all along? This possibility is supported further when in the next stanza McCartney describes the speaker as having "sunken eyes." After eyeing internet pictures of blackbirds, I can conclude that they do not have sunken eyes. So the blackbirds are a symbol for McCartney's audience. But who is his audience? McCartney later says that in light of tense race relations in the United States around this time following the Civil Rights Movement, black birds are black women because "bird" is British slang for "girl." McCartney may be bringing awareness to the disadvantages people of color face through systemic, often indirect racism but also their persistence and success when faced with these challenges.

I believe that "Blackbird" by the Beatles is poetry.

Logic-ally Everybody Should be Equal

Last May, Logic released a new album entitled Everybody. He was born in Rockville, Maryland to an African-american father who was suffering from a cocaine addiction and a white mother who suffered from alcoholism. From the start, Logic (or Sir Robert Bryson Hall II as his legal name) was at a disadvantage. Drug use heavily affected him as he was a child watching his brothers produce and distribute crack cocaine to addicts on the block and even sell to their own father.

By the time Logic was in high school, he knew how to manufacture and produce crack cocaine. He started smoking and drinking when he was 13 years old and while he could quit using marijuana and alcohol, he still battled a long term relationship with cigarettes even dedicating a song, "Nikki," on his album Under Pressure. Since the release of the album in 2014, he has since pledged to quit smoking cigarettes as well.

The amount of shit that he has gone through, fuels a lot of his songs. One of my favorite songs by him is Everybody. The entire album is incredible however, Everybody always stuck out to me. The overall message of the song is that everybody is human. Regardless of their race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. And if we started treating people with that in mind, we would be a lot better off as a society. A lot of popular rappers right now rap about women (usually not called "women" in the songs), sex, and drugs and it has no substance. While they might be catchy and fun to dance to, at the end of the day they don't really have a deeper meaning. Meanwhile, Logic raps about the discrimination and racism he experiences everyday and not being excepted by black or white people.
One of the first lines in Everybody is

Seems like everybody nowadays Hollywood
Oh it's like that now?

He's talked previously about other artists just wanting the glitz and glamour while he can see through their transparency. While that's not necessarily poetic, I think it shows his authentication or "realness," if you will.

One of my favorite lines is

Hell of a long way from equal is how they treat us
Body builder with the mind of a fetus
Turn on the television and see the vision they feed us

If that isn't poetry, I don't know what is. The meaning behind this could be interpreted in different ways. To me it's talking about firstly the inequality that is still so blatantly shown every day. He's basically saying that there's still a lot of time to come before we will find that all races are equal. He then goes into the next line, "Body builder with the mind of a fetus." Again this could be interpreted in different ways. To me, Logic was talking about the systemic injustice in our society. Being a "body builder" could relate to someone in law enforcement who is misusing their power because they have the "mind of a fetus" and cannot comprehend that others should not be treated based upon the pigment of their skin.

This has been an extreme issue in our society right now so to me, that's what those lines meant. Logic has talked about those lines and described his thought with them as being about the government and higher powers having leverage over everyone and mostly being motivated by greed and money.

Another section I really like is

In my blood is the slave and the master
It's like the devil playing spades with the pastor
But he was born with the white privilege
Man what the f*ck is that
White people told me as a child, as a little boy, playing with his toys
I should be ashamed to be black
And some black people look ashamed when I rap
Like my great granddaddy didn't take a whip to the back

The first line about having the blood of a slave and a master refers to the fact that he is mixed. He raps later in the song as well about not being accepted by the blacks or the whites because he didn't fit into their preconceived thoughts of who he should be. He's basically saying "Screw you, I'm going to be whatever I want to be." Logic talks about this in an interview saying that white people made him feel ashamed. Growing up he would ask his grandparents if he could sleep at their house saying he could stay in the guest room or on the floor but they always had an excuse as to why he couldn't. He says that he later realized that was because he's black.

This is poetry because he audience is to anyone who tried to screw him over or judged him based upon his skin color. It's also poetry because it has more than a surface level meaning. I only talked about a couple of lines however, you could go in depth with so many more of them.

General Thoughts on Citizen

I'm going to open this by saying that I am not good with poetry. Since middle school started to make poetry more of a task than a fun way to express myself, I've turned away from the medium for better or worse. However, Citizen is a key exception. While I may not be able to grasp all the meaning that Claudia Rankine has carefully placed into the page (for example, when she talks about using I,) but I can understand more than enough. This book, collection of poems, whatever you want to call it really, is an experience. While I may have reactions to other books I've read, Citizen brings out a much deeper response. This book, more than any other has managed to give a clear idea of what it is like to be the "other."

When we talk about binaries, we usually split things into the "us," and the "other." The idea is that binaries exist because in order to define ourselves, we must first set a group as the "other" in order to more clearly define ourselves. Usually binaries will get stuck as they are because of an inability for one group to really empathize with, see through the eyes of, and recognize the other group. Depending on who you are, Citizen fixes that issue. I am white, and Citizen very quickly and very effectively gave me an idea of what it is like to be an African American surrounded by white people.

Something that I thought was interesting was how Rankine kept coming back to how the white backdrop emphasized color. (Maybe not those exact words, but something close to it.) It makes me think of my hometown and how in many places, its very uniform. We have a decent amount of diversity here, but there are still some problems, and as some of my older teachers said, you can know whether a class is AP or not just looking at the kids in the class. There are problems all through the US with racism, and before anyone says "Hey! You're wrong! Things are better than they were!" I just have to say that a lot of the issues have just become more invisible. People are (supposed to be) on their best behavior in public, being sure not to offend anyone, and so we aren't made aware of the problems. Additionally, how can you know if society has planted subconscious racist patterns? I think that the unconscious programmer is the greatest threat at the moment. It's a hard issue to fix, but books like Citizen can help to spread awareness and show people the do's and don'ts so that everyone can get along better. Hopefully eventually a resolution will be reached, and Citizen  is the book to get the ball rolling.

Do not Turn a Blind Eye to Very Meaningful Sighs

A sigh is a sign of disappointment, defeat, frustration, boredom, and longing. In Citizen, the action of sighing appears multiple times through different passages. However, they all seem to connect together through their meaning. The sighs represent an attempt at a release of the feelings listed above.

 In some of the poems the speaker has become so understandably overcome with with feelings of despair and silence that, "the sigh is the pathway to breath" (60). The speaker's only method to continuing on with life and not letting acts hatred and racism consume them, is to let out a wordless, but not silent sound.

A powerful line about the action of sighing is found in the very beginning of part 4. Rankine writes, "...truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about" (59). This one line packs so much meaning. The speaker is saying that the person who created the reason for the sigh felt the need to say or do it urgently. Just as urgently as they did to release just a bit of the pain and frustration out. That the offenders cannot help themselves due to a lack of self control. Thus coming full circle with sighing. 

Sighing is used numerous more times in part four of Citizen. The complex action is woven into the poems to add another dimension to Rankine's, already, complex work. The release, or attempt at release, of built up emotion from people's ignorant and racist actions seems like a sort of coping mechanism for the silence that often follows such actions.

Sorry

In her book Citizen, Claudia Rankine reveals that acts of racism are not things of the past or anomalies that are exaggerated through the media but rather events in everybody’s life. Rankine begins her book will snippets of daily acts of racism (the airplane scene, the lunch with the woman at college, the neighbor calling the police, etc). In these cases, the offender is unaware of the pain that their actions inflict. Some say sorry while others do not.

People who apologize for saying racist things think that once they have apologized everything is okay. They are wrong. Unlike physical punches, words can seldom be dodged. When someone is told a racist comment, that comment sinks into them, leaving them to ponder about it and find either fault or truth in it. When these comments are a part of one’s everyday life, the false truth begins to outweigh the real truth. Thus, these fallacies eventually consume people, forcing them to see themselves not in their own eyes but others who look down on them. A simple “sorry” cannot stop this cycle. Sorry does not take pain away from bad actions.

When the neighbor called the police on the narrator’s friend, sorry did not help. Sorry did not take back the fact that four cop cars were called on an innocent person of color, because they were interpreted to be, “casing” homes. The neighbor is sorry, but did they ever consider that maybe the person outside was not doing anything wrong? Anyways, the friend was just standing outside minding their own business. Similar to what happened to Serena, did the friend’s skin color hinder the neighbor from seeing that they were causing no trouble?

I think that the power of the word sorry is more symbolic than it is meaningful. People say sorry all the time, but are they really sorry? I don’t think that people know how much their actions hurt others. When they do realize the pain their words inflict, saying sorry acts more to relive one of their own guilt rather than help the other person. Rankine delineates this in her book because when people apologize for their blatant acts of racism, their sorry at the end seems microscopic and void in comparison to their actions.

I Am a Citizen, Are You?

Before I even opened the book, I knew that the ideas it was going to explore were relevant to my country and therefore relevant to me. On the cover of Claudia Rankine's literary work, Citizen: An American Lyric, she takes the first step in inviting a white reader to listen to what she has to say.

The first part of the title, Citizen, evokes the idea of belonging in a country: a home country, a place that belongs to your family, your home, your country, you are welcome, you are proud, you belong. What makes someone a citizen? When you think of an American citizen, what image comes to your mind? All citizens have rights under the law, but not really. Not all citizens are treated the same. At the beginning and throughout the whole book, Rankine tells stories of micro-aggressions against black people and about racism on a larger systematic scale. She does bring up the word citizen again towards the end of the book, but by including it in the title, she puts the idea of what it means to be treated like a citizen in the readers mind immediately.

The second part of the title reads, An American Lyric. Before the book is even opened, the reader knows that it is about America as a whole, not a small group or part of America. Rankine makes it clear from the beginning that the stories she is about to tell are American stories. The stories about black people in America apply to all Americans. She forces the reader to realize that that the issues she writes about cannot be ignored. They cannot be put aside in a different category. They are American problems that white Americans need to pay attention to.

Impersonal Racism, Personal Reactions

Rankine’s use of the body in a both impersonal and deeply personal way brings to light how racism functions. By showing the impersonal way people make assumptions and punish the black body shows how racism functions without having sense to it. Rankine reveals the personal by describing the black body’s reaction to racism.

In a very intimate and particular kind of way, Rankine describes the reflex type reactions to racism from the point of view of the receiver of racism: “Your fingers cover your eyes, press them deep into their socks….”(66), “Words work as release- well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink….”(69) , “An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center.”(8)

All of these descriptions of sensations and reactions feel incredibly familiar. These reactions are ones people have had to many other situations other than racism therefore feel universal while also being deeply personal. These are reactions are so personal they feel lonely.

Rankine describes the nature of racism as impersonal by showing the actions of the perpetrators of racism: “Serena asks incredulously by asking if she looks like a gangster to him. Yes, he answers.”(34), “Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper?”(7), “...people who felt her black body did not belong on the court.” On the other hand, these general descriptions of the black body and their statements about where it belongs and where it does not shows the senseless nature of racism. It shows the privilege that comes with being racist and the dehumanization that comes with facing it. Acting in impersonal ways towards others shows a lack of acknowledgment of the other as a full and individual human being. In America, assumptions are constantly made about the black body, those making these assumptions base them solely on the appearance of blackness.

These two ways Rankine describes the back body are complete opposites. They contradict and contrast each other in extreme ways. She highlight the senselessness of one way of seeing black bodies by showing the humanness of the other.

Citizen in sports

I don't really like poetry at all actually. So, I was a little worried about Citizen even though it can sometimes not be displayed as poetry. However, after I read the first section of this book I was thrilled. I really enjoy reading this because its so unique and it expresses so much information in a different way than most books do. Yes, it is a short book with not a lot of words per page but if you actually look its enough words to tell the story that it wants to tell and the pictures help a lot to. I like every section in this book but my favorite section would be the second section about Serena Williams and all of the things that she went through. Zora Neale Hurston once said, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background"; the narrator uses this statement to frame the situation of Serena being a black player in an overwhelmingly white sport. The most oppositional force in Serena Williams career has been the umpire Mariana Alves, who made five bad calls against Serena in one match back in 2004. The narrator suggests that it must have been Serena's black body that was "getting in the way of Alves's sight line" (29). The next year, the tournaments would install line-calling technology to challenge umpire callings via replay. When Serena is back on the court, she will be watched by a line judge who calls her out for stepping on the line during any serve. The announcers denounce the call, and numerous replays cannot indicate the moment of foul. Serena explodes at the line judge, having been thrown against a sharp white background. When Serena won at the 2012 Olympics, announcers said that she was "Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world... akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church" (33). When told that the dance she had performed was called a Crip Walk, Serena asked if she looked like a gangster. The comment is taken and received lightly. She went on to win every match in 2012, and commentators would "remark on her ability to hold it together" despite questionable calls as usual (34). The section ends with Serena's tennis opponent, playfully embodying Serena’s physical attributes by stuffing cloth in her shirt and shorts on the court. The literal and metaphorical tennis match held throughout the book gives us a glimpse into the life of Serena Williams as well as the life of black Americans.

Natural Disasters Don't Discriminate, Emergency Aid Can, and Does

In Claudia Rankine's book titled Citizen, she writes a piece on Hurricane Katrina, the horrific category 5 hurricane that swept the Southeastern states like Alabama, Mississippi, and disproportionately more so, Louisiana and it's popular city, New Orleans. The immediate aftermath of the storm was atrocious, having flooded entire cities, breaking dams and levees, practically trapping or displacing thousands of people in a matter of days. Rankine writes a found poem, a collection of statements said on CNN's reporting of the cyclone. She quotes survivors who felt a physical and social isolation perpetuated by the lack of the federal government's execution of public preparation and subsequent aid. New Orleans, a city who's population is 60% black, had 80% of its land flooded; but natural disasters don't discriminate, emergency aid, arguably, can, and does. A day after the Lake Pontchartrain Levee flooded over, Louisiana's National Guard requested seven hundred buses for a mass evacuation, as the Superdome, filled with 30,000 evacuees had only prepared to sustain 36 hours worth of food. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who, days prior, was granted full discretion by the Bush Administration to mobilize aid to the victims, only sent one hundred out of the seven hundred requested evacuation buses. This federal neglect continued for days after as Bush dilly dallied around the country, hosting birthday parties, and ignoring pleas from New Orleans national guard demanding "everything you've (Bush) got." Rankine quotes a survivor "And someone said, where were the buses? And simultaneously someone else said FEMA said it wasn't safe to be there... What I'm hearing, she said, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas" (84). 
Many questions arise from our countries response to our first post-9/11 national emergency. The insane mismanagement of our federal bureaucracies and the factor that race and socio-economic status played in this situation perpetuated many Americans further distrust with their leaders. The lack of urgency from the Bush Administration and federal government as a whole begs the question, how did race impact the response and recovery of Hurricane Katrina? Subsequently, the handling of Katrina has been compared to our nation's reactions with Hurricane Harvey and Flint, Michigan. The Root argues that climate change and racism are too often overlooked contributors when America talks about natural disasters, even though they can be the largest causes of sustained suffering. 
Rankine added a piece on the handling of Hurricane Katrina in her novel for a reason. It's well over time we start addressing these factors on a larger scale, so the effects of natural disasters are limited to its course, rather than our conscious. 

Here are links to more articles regarding Hurricane Katrina:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/13/katrina.response/
https://www.theroot.com/race-and-class-are-the-biggest-issues-around-hurricane-1798536183 
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/08/hurricane_katrina_10th_anniversary_how_the_black_lives_matter_movement_was.html 
http://www.history.com/topics/hurricane-katrina