In the Book Citizen by Claudia Rankine documents systematic racism through a second person point of view, mainly for the reader to come to an understanding and feel how racism can affect their bodies, minds, and emotions. Rankine does write through the second person point of view in a way that is very thought provoking that is consistent throughout the book. Although she changes through different styles of writing in the book, one thing that stays consistent is the talking of racism in different undertones. Sometimes the undertones can be very obvious and others very subtle to where you can be confused about what was really going on. Another thing that is very consistent throughout the book is microaggression towards the African Americans, mainly to show what they have to go through on a day to day basis.

Racism and through it main form through the book microaggression (comments or actions that are subtlety expressing discrimination) are core themes in Cluadia Rakine’s Citizen. Through the use of poetry and prose writing she explores the cost that racism casts in all forms takes on the black community and specifically the speaker of the poems/ Microaggressions are words and actions that most of the time, unknowingly exposes people’s prejudices. Rakine gives us the audience countless scenarios, schemes, and examples of how microaggression happens in everyday life in Citizen. In the first passage in Chapter 3 a friend uses language that targets as well as stereotypes the speaker’s race. In another example is when the microaggression with the cashier asks the speaker if she thinks her card will be declined. This action discloses the cashier’s bias about black people: they are either poor or irresponsible and have bad credit. Rankine continuously details these microaggressions, illustrating the constant attacks of prejudice that African Americans live with.

The racism does not end with microaggressions, however. Rankine also focuses on a larger, more overtly threatening and institutional forms of racism. The poems in Chapter 6 in particular move through a series of examples of racism in American society and the justice system. Rankine addresses shooting and killing of black men. In the case of Trayvon Martin the shooter is a white neighborhood watchman. In another poem, she writes about James Craig Anderson, a 47-year-old black man who was killed by white teenagers yelling white-power slogans. These acts are not microaggressions: they are deadly manifestations of hatred and racial prejudice. The speaker illustrates the emotional toll of living both with a daily onslaught of latent prejudice and in the larger shadow of fear that comes just from being black in America.

In America there is a lot of mainly unresolved bias, biogtry, discrimination, racism and other things that people are not talking about. There are also largely people who are living in fear whether it is because of the police, certain types of people, people on the internet, because who they are, and probably lots of other things. Considering the fact it isn’t fair for people to be treated so unfairly and quite honestly horrible, just based on the color of their skin, or because of who their parents are. Not to mention it probably is worse if they happen to have a disability or a preexisting condition. The book Citizen points out in a beautiful but tragic way how people are treated, and others just see it as normal or they look away since they don’t want to be part of the solution, they are just part of the problem.

I believe I deserve an eighty. I have been doing work for English even though I haven’t been turn my work in. I have been doing annotations even though sometimes some of the pieces we are annotating make me feel like my eyes are bleeding since when I am doing them I am really tired.

These second six weeks have been a little hard kicking bad habits since we are all not in person. I feel little better that I am reading a little more, even though they are for school. As a writer I think I progressed a little bit more since the last update even though it during class. For reaching my goals in reading I would like to say I am slowly reaching there. I kind of feeling like my learning has grown mainly for annotating since I have more experience with it, but for the triangle thing, it’s more like I understand it’s purpose but I really don’t see it’s use.

As I feel for as a student not very well since I am really a procrastinator, and I am trying to use my Asynchronous time wisely but sometimes I just focus on something else and then totally forget what I was supposed to do. For how I want these next six weeks to go I want to make them better all around, but I need to set more realistic goals so for asynchronous time mainly trying to focus on staying to task until I finish the assignment.

In conclusion I feel like I deserve an eighty, I know that next six weeks I can work myself up to a 90. Mainly by using my Asynchronous time wisely and staying on task, as well as turning stuff in. I could also work on my reading habits, as well as kicking my bad reading habits out.

I rather be alone and be an introvert than be in a constant noisy environment. I rather be sleeping than having to go outside. I’d rather be free than be caged, but how isn’t caged by their own mind sometimes. Sometimes some days are better than others, and other times some days are worse than others. I’d rather swim than stay outside on land and run the risk of getting bug bites, since I hate bug bites. Sometimes I wish I could do things I’m not able to do like having nap time from kindergarten. I’d rather that our world and society as a whole was more accepting of different people, like I am not like you but I accept you as you are even though I might not go through the same things as you. I wish people could not be so violent, but that Is simply not ever going to happen.

I rather be alone and be an introvert than be in a constant noisy environment. I rather be sleeping than having to go outside. I’d rather be free than be caged, but how isn’t caged by their own mind sometimes. Sometimes some days are better than others, and other times some days are worse than others. I’d rather swim than stay outside on land and run the risk of getting bug bites, since I hate bug bites. Sometimes I wish I could do things I’m not able to do like having nap time from kindergarten. I’d rather that our world and society as a whole was more accepting of different people, like I am not like you but I accept you as you are even though I might not go through the same things as you. I wish people could not be so violent, but that Is simply not ever going to happen.

Prologue is mainly trying to get the reader to look at a minority through a different lens. Prologue part Urbanity mainly is trying to connect everything together, saying that basically we were made from the earth we will return to the earth. It is also saying that nothing is actually original, everything is reused, to quote “but nothing is original, everything comes from something before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed.”(4)  Prologue part Hard, Fast mainly is trying to teach that no matter what someone is going to get hurt or blamed, and people trying to adapt. Prologue part Massacre of Prologue talks about people growing up hearing stories of people who are massacred for their race. They also hear stories of how they preserved and survived. Prologue part Rolling Head is talking about how people can be changed by other people’s narratives, since no one is letting them speak.

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue   
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,   
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to   
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye   
Berries cast dark   
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,   
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.   
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.   
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive   
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The poem is called Ariel. It constantly refers to death and outright says that she is suicidal. The poem also talks about shadows, maybe referring to the depression and dark thoughts that are going on in her mind. It also talks about something pulling her out, hauling her through the air.

It talks a lot about death that it might be to someone else’s point of view reading it, might be a suicide note or in this case a poem. It talks about death with dead hands and dead stringency. The dead stringency she might be referring to might be feeling like something is closing in on her, or something tightening on her. She refers to herself as an arrow that does the job to kill. It also refers to a child’s wail melting into a wall. I think it is trying to convey that when a child or her child sees that she has killed herself that the child will start crying and that it will be heard by others, and the others will see as well. She also write “the cauldron of morning” probably meaning that she is going to commit suicide sometime it the morning before anyone else is wake so they will find her body and not be able to stop her from committing suicide.

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.   
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.   
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.   
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses   
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff   
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,   
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.   
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,   
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;   
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat   
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.   
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley   
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books   
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.   
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them   
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.   

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.   
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,   
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,   
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.   
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,   
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow   
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,   
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.   
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.   
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river   
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.   
They concentrate my attention, that was happy   
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;   
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,   
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

The poem is constantly alluding to tulips as the poem is called. The poem refers to the tulips as sinkers that are used for fishing. It refers to the tulips as something dangerous, like an animal. A quote states “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.” and another says “The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals: They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat”. She is constantly making it seem like these innocent flowers are harmful to her, and or hurting her in some way. At the end she is talking about water like seawater, and that it comes from a country faraway like health. She might be alluding to her health might be deteriorating. The health she might be referring to might not be her physical health but rather her mental or emotional health. In her biography it is stated that she had committed suicide. It also stated that “In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.””  Which means the health she is referring to is her mental health. It also shows that she was most likely bipolar depressed at the time she was alive to write that journal entry.