Feeling Invisible

The first part of citizen focuses on microaggressions that people of color have to deal with everyday. Many of the people that Claudia Rankine writes about are people that she is close to such as her friends who accidentally offend her. While she most likely forgave her friends for being insensitive, over time these moments add up to make her feel angry and in some circumstances, invisible. For example, Rankine writes about an African American woman looking back on her childhood when she was 12 years old in catholic school. The white girl behind her in class asked several times to cheat off of her. The girl constantly cheated off of her but the teacher never found out. The speaker speculates that “[Sister Evelyn] might think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there” (6). This shows how the speaker feels invisible. The teacher wouldn’t have guessed that the white girl was cheating off of the black girl. Although the fact that the teacher did not realize how she was making her feel invisible, microaggressions such as these build up over time and make people feel invisible.