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.