Poetic Reality

Claudia Rankine's Citizen is an incredible work of poetry and nonfiction that directly addresses the issues of race relations in different social arenas. In the excerpt of the story that discusses the youtube personality Hennessey Youngman, Rankine wrote, "You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints" (24). This quotation best exemplifies what it means to be a black celebrity and what many have to capitalize on in order to succeed. Rankine's use of "disappointment" as a means to describe how many black people have to compromise their choices to market themselves. The author also directly discusses how this fact clarifies the racial relationship between black and white Americans. Overall the author uses this example to solidify the image of how black people are perceived in the United States.