Citizen and White Overreaction

In Claudia Rankine's lyric, Citizen, she has page in which a very interesting racial encounter takes place...

"In line at the drugstore, it's finally your turn, and then it's not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The Cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he was truly surprised.

Oh my god I didn't see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no , no, I really didn't see you"

This is a very short chapter but I think the most interesting part was the drug store incident but it is also very confusing about what the white man was actually thinking. While on the surface it looks like it was a typical white man assuming the world is his for the taking, it seemed to me that the white man completely overreacted to a normal innocent encounter with another person, but when he realized that Rankine was a black woman, he didn't know what to do. His immediate reaction was to over-correct himself because he saw a black person and tried to make sure he wasn’t offending her in any type of way and was pleading to her that he didn’t see her. While it sounds like the man is being a nice guy, I think that it would’ve been different with another white person. He assumed that it was a terrible racial encounter rather than just a normal mistake with another person, seeing her as a colored, different person, not just another human.

It is also a cool section because it relates to the invisibility Rankine expressed as a black woman earlier in the book, the man didn’t see her at all and that was just one of the examples of her being invisible. IF the man really was right in the fact that he didn't actually see her, it proves everything right for her. She is just being disregarded as an African-American, and as a woman.