"Soon, these small, private experiences – which Rankine gathered from her own life and from friends’ anecdotes – begin to accumulate. Their power is incremental, collective, claustrophobic, in the text as in life. Echoes and repetitions across the prose poem enact a sort of systemic spread. Soon this private world of solitarily experienced, silently swallowed incidents erupts into the sphere of public event and global notice...
Citizen’s “you” refuses to denote a single addressee, let alone one gender or one racial identity. Its referent changes from line to line. It telescopes in and out, singularises, pluralises, reverses, and its shifts keep the reader mobile, continually asking: Which one am I? Where do I fit in? It is impossible to read without questioning your own part in the racist social structures it recounts.
The poem is a song and a summons, a cry and a gathering, one long “calling out” like the one that Rankine put into practice at the US Open, and which she exercises in daily life. This, she says, is partly a function of responsible parenting. If she is out with her daughter in a public place “and somebody does something that is unacceptable or says something that is racist, I call it out immediately,” she says...
“How do you keep the black female body present and how do you own value for something that society won’t give value to? It’s a question I try to answer through my own life.”"
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/29/poet-claudia-rankine-invisibility-black-women-everyday-racism-citizen?CMP=share_btn_fb
How do you keep the black female body present...
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