Find this and other Reviews at In Tori LexThis book is a beautiful reflection at how racist microaggressions that most minority's face mentally chip away at the people who experience them. It's documents the weight of excusing racists slights and ignoring views in attempts to just exist as human.The book navigates between short poems and powerful vignettes. One of the most memorable being the disconcerting feeling and shame that happens when your friend says something to you that is racist, and

Look at the cover. A hoodie. The iconic image of American fear. Urban danger. Gang-bangers. A seventeen-year-old boy in Miami Gardens, FL. The shooting death of an unarmed black manThe shooting death of an unarmed black manThe shooting death of an unarmed black manLet Me Google That For You Trayvon MartinMichael BrownWalter ScottEzell FordThe hoodie on the cover is empty. Claudia Rankine fills it with experiences. The experiences of Americans whose color has rendered them invisible to the many w...

Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. I loved this small piece of prose, "feeling most colored when thrown against a sharp white background." As a huge Serena Williams fan, I read with rapt attention to the expose' on Serena's plunge against that sharp white background. I felt a sense of rage that has always been there, burning. For Serena has

This book is necessary and timely. It was timely fifty years ago. I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation... maybe we call it rageignation. Outstanding book.

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue."Necessa...

Claudia Rankine zeros in on the microaggressions experienced by non-white people, particularly black females, in the United States.These kinds of books basically make me feel:Possibly the most memorable essay in here examines Serena Williams and her experiences in tennis - how she is portrayed, how she is treated on the court, her reactions and how those in turn are portrayed. Also memorable to me are the little tidbits from Rankine's experience, such as people complaining to her about what they...

Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. I did find moments of lucidity (on Serena Williams; on everyday racism; on Zidane). But for the most part, I found this terribly self-indulgent, formless adolescent gloop that felt like listening to a cultural studies student breathlessly talking about las...

This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. The thing is, most people who commit these microaggressions don't realize they are making them yet they have an accumulated effect on the psyche. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" is so apt, especially for those o...

A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. It’s rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many.

claudia rankine is oxygen to a world under water.

**Update (4/6/16)** Tonight I had the privilege to attend a reading and discussion with Claudia Rankine here in Holland. It was a real treat. Especially powerful was seeing the visual elements of her book brought to life on the screen, with the video (made by her husband John Lucas), the music all mingling with her words to create an intensely powerful and emotive display. Rankine is a pure joy to hear read and speak, full of wit and humor and a reminder to us all that we all have the responsibi...

Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. It’s a quick listen at 1.5 hours. Short on words, but every one counts and rings with purpose. I highly recommend the audio version.

Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Rankine’s small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others’ motives, actions, language. She writes in second person: "you." It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. You take to wearing sunglasses inside.I call these essays while Holly Bass in the NYTimes calls them poems. They are fragments, scripts or screenplays for video or film, shards of thought, sharp and able to pierc...

After reading Citizen, it’s hard not to hear Rankine’s voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. What did he say? What did she just do? We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. Whether Rankine is talking about tennis or going out to dinner, or spinning words until you’re not sure which direction you’re facing, there is strength, anger, and a call for white readers like myself to see what’s in front of

Do you remember that incident early in the primary campaign in 2016 when a young black woman staged a silent protest by reading a book during a Trump rally? Well, this is the book, and I think you should read it too. It covers some of the same ground as Coates' Between the World and Me, but Rankine is older and perhaps wiser. And Rankine got there first.Her book is a well-constructed bricolage of anecdote, poetry, criticism, and multi-media presentation, expertly designed by Rankine's photograph...

"Where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?"When I downloaded this book, I thought it was a book of poetry. It's not. It's a book of musings, meditations. Kinda like journal entries, kinda like essays. The author includes some brilliant artwork that fits in nicely with her words.  Even though I discovered it's not poetry and initially didn't like that it's written in the second person, I decided to read it anyway based on the blurb here on Goodreads. For

This is a poignant powerful work of art. It's more than a book. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). (That part surprised me.) Rankine does a brilliant job taking an in-depth look at life being black. She says the things that we have all said and describes situations we have all been in. In the light of the horrors that are finally coming out in the US concerning the police and its poor treatment of Black Americans...

A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. With rightful anger and sadness Claudia Rankine details the racism she has experienced in the United States, as well as the racism that surrounds popular black people in the media like Serena Williams, Barack Obama, and Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow , we like to think that we live in a colorblind society, when in reality that false belief just blinds us to the way...

4.5 starsI read about 40 pages of this back in September for Diverseathon, but for some reason, I really couldn't get into it then. Maybe it was that I should've have forced myself to read it in such a quick amount of time, because this story definitely warrants taking your time and digesting what it's trying to say. I continually put this off after that, citing that I was bored and didn't want to continue reading if it was going to be something painstaking.However, I brought this book home with...

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 is 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. --Citizen lead me to several thoughts: on the surface, I want to read all of Claudia Rankine's work, AND I didn't realize that prose poetry was such a thing (how did I miss this?) and