Citizen

If I were asked to describe this book in a few words, I’d say that it was a meditation on race relations in today’s USA - and perhaps by implication the Western world - expressed in poetry, prose and scripts for videos, interwoven with photographs, paintings and graphics.

At times the poetry is so dense and abstract, I couldn’t follow it. The scripts for the situation videos don’t read as well as they play. (You can see them at claudiarankine.com/Situations.) For me the real power of this book is in the descriptions of deliberate/unwitting racism in daily life. As in:

The credit card handed over by a black woman, but returned to her white companion in a restaurant. The neighbour calling the police on a black house-sitter who’s simply walked out onto the front lawn to get better mobile reception. Tennis player Caroline Wozniacki ‘imitating’ Serena Williams by stuffing towels into her top and shorts. You read them – or at least, I read them – slack-jawed with amazement at such casual, unthinking, insults.

The biggest impact of all comes from a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930. Citizen has edited out the two victims, leaving only the faces of the white witnesses – a smiling young couple; a man pointing proudly at the hanging men – and forcing you, the reader, to look at them, to see the perpetrators, and celebrators, of this murder. To see how normal they look. How average. And to reflect that if you passed them on the street, you probably wouldn’t give them so much as a second glance.