Master’s Thesis
The Mysteries of the Visible; Race and Gender in Citizen: An
American Lyric
Graduate School of Humanities
MA in Literature and Culture: Specialisation English
Supervisor:
Table of Contents
1.INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. OVERVIEW 1 1.2. SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT 4 3.BLACK SUBJECTIVITY 14 3.1. REPRESENTATION 14 3.2. PERFORMING RACE 23 4. VISIBILITY 28 5. BLACK BODIES 375.1. THE TRADITION OF BODYING BLACK PEOPLE 37
5.2. THE PROBLEM WITH DIVERSITY 42
6. CONCLUSION 47
1.Introduction
1.1. OverviewThis thesis aims to clarify the issues of black (female) identity within a society dominated by Eurocentric white power structures as they are presented in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. I have singled out several key topics that I will discuss through cultural theory and contextualise through significant events in recent history. Through the analysis of key themes such as racial subjectivity, representation and agency it hopes to
contextualise the often vague narrative of the collection. The key topics discussed are the notion of humanity, black subjectivity, visibility and representation. The analysis of what it is that we consider as human allows for a deeper understanding of the root problem of sexism and racism within a Eurocentric patriarchal society. The point here is not to rephrase the popular discourse of the white established patriarchy but rather to analyse how
Eurocentrism has affected African diasporic cultures. It is thus meant as a tool to start revisiting the concept of a unity of homo sapiens of all races and genders, rather than as an attack of the established white patriarchy. This analysis of the notion of humanity then leads to its application to the concepts of black subjectivity, visibility and representation, as these are profoundly affected by the vague definition of humanity but are rarely questioned within the broader picture of humanity.
Rankine’s work operates as counter-poetics to the traditional structures of reporting on race and gender issues which are predominantly Eurocentric. Her use of poetry, artwork, prose and film- and news report scripts creates a patchwork portrait of what it feels like to be black in the United States. Citizen is divided into seven poetic sections that are
accompanied by images of artwork. Set up around the stream of consciousness of an unidentified black female narrator, Citizen relies on news report scripts or collections of
quotes by unnamed public figures to round off its analysis of the African American lived experience. This collection of various voices allows the reader to familiarise themselves with a multifaceted dialogue surrounding racial discussions. Both black and white voices receive a platform to voice their thoughts and ideas on black people, creating a microcosm of the American social climate. While it is not clear who the narrator of the frequent moments of introspections is, it can be assumed that they represent the thoughts of a black woman. I would even argue that they are meant to represent the anxiety of the average non-white woman in the United States as they highlight the many sexist and racist microaggressions people and women of colour especially face on a daily basis. The juxtaposition of opposing and always anonymous voices highlights the overall missing sense of a shared,
race-transcending humanity in most Western societies which perpetuates racist behaviour. The passages of self-reflection expressed through a stream of consciousness narrative starting from the first chapter are progressively contextualised and illustrated throughout Citizen. Recurring themes such as visibility, agency or subjectivity are often first presented through the narrator’s personal, unvoiced thoughts and then revisited through public incidents that most readers will have heard about but will have dismissed as ‘wrongfully ordinary' (117). Rankine's writing style lets the reader participate in her
omnipresent feelings of anxiety and unease and illustrates the daily struggle black people, and women especially; face in the white-dominated Western World. From racist remarks by prominent characters such as Laura Bush to racially motivated injustices in sports, Citizen creates a blueprint of historically racist societies. Especially the focus on Serena Williams’ career and personal profile relates the main narrator’s feelings of anxiety not only to her blackness but to her black womanhood in general. Her gender and race seem to be combined into a double handicap rendering her at the same time hypervisible as not
conforming to Eurocentric norms and ideals and invisible as a second-class citizen both in race and gender.
I analyse the context surrounding Citizen’s at times vague allusions to racism and sexism by relating them to- and mirroring them with the broader public discourse
surrounding race. This discourse is still very marginalised and can thus seem repetitive if not counterproductive to those not directly affected by racism. While Rankine manages to grasp the feeling of marginalisation and otherness many people of colour experience, the biggest fault I would attribute to Citizen: An American Lyric is its lack of clarity. Many of the events or comments described lack context and thus risk to be easily overlooked. Rankine expects her readership to put in the work of gathering information during the read, but this trust in an informed readership can lead to many important points and nuances being lost to the mainstream reader. The informed reader will easily understand the allusions she makes to notable events or figures; the uninformed but curious ally however, might find the narration too complex to be able to engage with it actively. This thesis thus aims to clarify the highly important issues of black (female) identity laid out in Citizen: An American Lyric by
1.2. Socio-cultural Context
Published in 2014, Citizen: An American Lyric came out during ‘at a vital moment in time’ as Dan Chiasson wrote for the New Yorker. As the following chapters will illustrate, the time was indeed ripe for a work such as Rankine’s. Rankine had published other pieces on race and gender before, but Citizen was able to break open the literary scene and reach an incredibly broad audience. With over 40’000 copies in print in the first year alone, it had the power to compel both a mainstream and a more critical, traditional literary audience by giving an identity to the often anonymous and marginalised black struggle.
The past five years in general have seen an emergence and widespread visibility of women of colour's issues in both print and digital media. Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album, which was published in 2016, one year after the publication of Citizen and had a never before seen impact with the amount of marginalised and mainstream people reached. Selling 485’000 copies in the first week of sales alone, it created a shift in dialectic
surrounding race and gender issues. Lemonade created a race-transcending debate on the reality of (gendered) racism in the United States. The album unleashed and amplified many voices from different races that finally felt like they had a platform to speak up on and paved the way for a less apologetic discourse on race even in the traditional,
white-dominated mainstream media. Like Citizen: An American Lyric, Lemonade focused on issues such as police brutality, the detrimental portrayal of black people in media and the
ambiguous position of the black woman as a both hyper- and invisible entity in society. Citizen could be seen as a realist or even naturalist foil to Beyoncé’s commercialised reflection on the current state of racism and sexism in the United States.
Comparable in message to Lemonade, Rankine’s work is less positive in execution however as it reports on omnipresent racial tensions but lacks the empowering rallying cries
Beyoncé’s work is defined by. Moreover, does Lemonade not only cater to a broader, but therefore also to a generally less informed audience than Citizen. The beauty but possibly also danger of Citizen lies in its complexity. Rankine does give insights into her- and with this many black American women’s psyche, but she does so in warped ways. Not only is there rarely any indication of time or space in her stream of consciousness narratives, but she also often relates to incidents that are well known but that she expresses in ways that need dismantling. She does not serve her readers set facts, but forces them to research, dissect and reflect on the presented content. Rankine seems to trust her readership to invest the necessary effort into understanding her reflections. Especially in her scripts for ‘Situation video', which are gathered towards the end of the book, she often presents dialogues without context, forcing the reader to research by her or himself what the general setting could be. While this offers an interesting read for those already engaged in the cause, it can prove difficult and disheartening for the less informed readership. Thanks to new media however, this less invested readership can now engage in less familiar subjects by quickly gaining the information it lacked before. It is also new media that has allowed for works like Lemonade to inspire and rally people for a new cause that originated in traditional print media such as Citizen, by highlighting the importance of intersectional feminism.
Like many other social reforms or calls for justice, black feminism was virtually invisible to the general public for a very long time. Overshadowed by its mainstream sister white (upper-) middle-class feminism, its demands were often drowned out by the less ‘radically' motivated and thus less ‘threatening’ demands of white feminism. Out of the four waves of feminism that are generally recognised today, only the fourth openly and actively recognises the plights of women of colour. While third wave feminism, which lasted from about the early 1990's until the early 2010's started embracing intersectionality, the fourth
wave is the most inclusive one so far. This is largely due to its digital nature; the endless possibilities of the World Wide Web and especially social media allow for individuals to connect and express themselves in ways that may not be possible within their physical communities. The success of Rankine’s Citizen can thus partly be attributed to this new digital feminism. By reaching a wider non-traditional audience, print works such as hers can finally be acknowledged for what they are, namely voices of a generation.
It is also this fourth wave feminism that has allowed for empowering online messages that have spread into the physical world. Movements such as the embrace of natural hair for Women of Colour, the 2017 Women's Marches and most prominently the recent ‘me too' hashtag connecting and empowering victims of sexual harassment and assault. Powered by the fast-paced social media world and its ‘call-out-culture' many formerly disinterested users have started seeing and openly addressing oppressive injustices that were previously considered minor or even worse; as a status quo. One particularity of this intersectional fourth wave feminism is the young age of many of its activists. About 88 % of American teenagers aged 13-18 have access to the internet and social media. Thanks to the relatively easy access to the internet for most teenagers in the North-Western hemisphere and their impressionability paired with the almost traditionally rebellious attitude of youths towards the generation that came before them, young people have been picking up on the ideas of intersectional feminism in an attempt to create a more equal space for a broader audience, be it online or in real life. I would argue that the power of this new wave of feminism lies in its intersectionality; some 50 years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, its equal
humanity than a forced set of rules to the young, mainstream informed public.1 This does by no means imply that the United States and the Western world in general are cured of racism, sexism and all other forms of oppressive ‘-isms’ as is illustrated in Citizen. It does however show that, confirmed by the 1964 laws and similar ones across the globe that the is an essential shift in the perception and representation of race issues. Especially educated young people have started to live the reality of social justice rather than abide to it by force. Social media thus plays an essential part in the spread of intercultural and intercommunal acceptance, especially amongst young users.
While this does have the positive effect of uniting and empowering social justice activists, it may also lead to what Asam Ahmad calls an ‘armchair and academic brand of activism' (Ahmad 2015). This sort of limited activism brands the negative trend of social media users limiting their activism to online replies and alienating those who do not share their opinion. Rather than engaging in productive discussions, they let the screen between themselves and the perceived ‘wrong' opinion limit their engagement. Creating such ‘bubbles' of social justice prevents the exchange beyond like-minded people, they are paralysed beyond a certain point. Due to the superficiality and lack of actual engagement of such online movements they are often short-lived. However, while individual movements or hashtags do not seem to be able to stand the test of time, they do have the benefit of uniting otherwise anonymous social media users under the banner of a shared humanity and equality. As small as it may be, such movements promote change that will live on in the physical world in varying forms. Works such as Rankine's are therefore not to be neglected throughout this praise of social media activism as they are well anchored within this cycle of
1 I will further analyse this notion of a common humanity in chapter 2 ‘The Concept of Humanity’.
online-virtual activist engagement. It is authors like her who create content that outlasts online trends and can reach more traditional audiences alongside the new media audiences. Beyoncé’s powerful digital album she is thus a virtual foil to Claudia Rankine’s ‘traditional’ medium of reporting on race and gender issues.
Citizen contextualises the interactions between people of colour and those people that have not yet embraced or even understood the shared humanity of people of all racial backgrounds championed by such movements mentioned above. Several high-profile cases of racism and gendered racism illustrated throughout the American Lyric give an insight into the detrimental health effects of institutionalised racism. The constant and almost casual microaggressions interweaved with these cases show the need for such movements. They prove that institutionalised oppressive thinking will not be challenged by the literal
institutions that created them but that it is up to the individual to help create new frameworks of understanding our shared humanity.
2. Humanity
Citizen: An American Lyric portrays the substantial socio-cultural divides that still exist between people of colour and white people. Citizen shows how people of colour are often overlooked, mistreated and marginalised to the point that one could question their value as human beings. The negative way in which most of their interactions with white people are portrayed paints a picture of a general dehumanisation of black people. As I will illustrate in the following chapters, Citizen portrays black people as being held to different standards than white people which often leaves them feeling less worthy through the constant
marginalisation and patronisation they suffer. This is a recurring theme in the physical world as well. For centuries people of colour have been actively dehumanised in order to justify their mistreatment by Eurocentric powers. The nonchalant animalisation of black people is thankfully no longer common, but their humanity still has to be asserted.
The tragically popular ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement for example, refers to the systematic violence and institutionalised racism black people experience in the United States. The slogan demands that black people finally be treated humanely; i.e. more like white people, insinuating that there is a hierarchical value to different lives and that the lives that matter most are white. Rankine refers to these varying levels of human worthiness by illustrating the different treatments white and black victims and perpetrators receive.2 The tolerance rather than the acceptance that is often visible in Citizen thus calls for an analysis of how humanity is usually defined.
In "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" Donna Harroway mentions the idea of the ‘god trick’. This concept is
2 I analyse the different modes of reporting on black crime in comparison to white crime in chapter 4 ‘Black Subjectivity and Representation’.
one that I would argue started with the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century.
This period is lauded for its advances in science, the arts and philosophy as, for the first time in Christian history, it put Man and his ability to reason at the forefront of intellectual debates and defined this as the primary source of authority.
The notion of the ‘god trick’ then, is the idea that one can view everything without a fixed point of view or detached from any form of subjectivity, effectively extending the possibility of omniscience to mankind rather than just to God. Especially many thinkers of the Enlightenment saw themselves as viewing humanity objectively by using what they considered to be mankind’s biggest asset; rationality. This new way of relying completely on rationality thus created the idea of ‘Man’ that we; at least in part; still adhere to today. God was no longer the most important judge, but Man himself became the highest entity. This carved out a way of thinking that focused on the cognitive methodology of the Western European intellectual elite and reshaped the Western European cultural landscape. And while this focus on mankind brought on countless advances in philosophy, the arts and the sciences, I would argue that it was instrumental to the creation of the racist ideologies still in place today. This way of rationalising fortified the white man as the epitome of
humanity.3Within this framework, humanity is thus not defined as the collective of homo
sapiens all over the world but as the social construct of a collection of ‘humane’ qualities based on white European cultural standards. Humanity was then seen as the collective of those societies embracing and analysing the possibilities of manmade rationality. Focusing on this feeling of intellectual superiority, these colonising societies effectively marginalised and patronised all non-European i.e. non-white cultures as less developed and deserving of
3 I deliberately use ‘man’ with a minuscule ‘m’, as the Enlightenment was, with some rare exceptions shaped by the white male elite.
agency. Only those societies ‘enlightened’ enough to focus on rationality in the way of the great European thinkers of the time were thus considered worthy enough to be called humans as opposed to the ‘savages’ they would go on to dominate. The intellectual qualities gained by the Enlightenment replaced the need for a dogmatic God to understand the world and replaced it with the rationale of the white man.
The Eurocentric way in which the socio-cultural landscape in Europe and North America is handled even today, then barely takes the many migrations, both voluntary and involuntary, into account that have taken place over the last centuries and that should have significantly reshaped the said landscape. The Transatlantic slave trade which took place during the ‘formative’ years of the United States from the early 17th century until the early
to mid 19th century, essentially allowed the white settlers to make up their own rules about
the black people they had enslaved just as the Europeans had done during the
Enlightenment. The beliefs of the Enlightenment and the supposedly uncivilised clean slate the settlers found in the territories and people of North America were the perfect breeding ground for a racist, Eurocentric society. So even though ‘only' an estimated 390'000
thousand enslaved Africans were shipped to the United States, these arbitrary standards are to a certain extent still enforced on their millions of descendants to this day. The displaced and enslaved people brought in from Africa and in some cases from the Caribbean brought their own cultures which became virtually invisible or transformed out of necessity into new, diasporic cultures. Their cultural relevance was suppressed from the start as an attempt to crush their spirits. This attempt at destroying the black diaspora's identity was not only meant to dishearten them and prevent them from rebelling, but it was also an attempt at stripping them of their humanity and justifying the atrocities committed against them. Being able to create a common culture is a trait unique to humans and would thus be
considered an important factor in defining humanity in the sense the white elites saw it. By refusing a rich culture to grow, or even to exist, they ensured the white dominions’ position as the culturally superior entity. Black culture would have been seen as proof of a collective intellectual and creative achievement and would have undermined the dehumanisation of people of colour that was necessary to control them. Even as the Zeitgeist shifted from representing and perceiving black people as barely worth more than chattel during the Atlantic slave trade period to acknowledging them as inferior humans in the 19th century,
they were still suffering from being othered in the modernist period of the 20th century. As
Anne Annlin Cheng argues, the reflection, reasoning and value attached to the human body were the notion of skin were being renovated at the beginning of the 20th century. The fantasy of a renewed and disciplined body can be found in the arts and especially in Modernism. Modernism was, according to Cheng ‘obsessed’ (Cheng 8) with the perfection of skin and, inspired by mechanical reproduction, the body becomes a powerful tool where blackness now represents the primitive and brute force opposing the ‘white dress of civilisation’ (11). While blackness was then no longer considered inherently animalistic, it was still used as a tool to highlight the superiority of the European colonial metropoles. The fascination with black skin was now rooted in its implied primitivism that was supposed to oppose the disenchantment or demystification following the Enlightenment and even more so the Industrial Revolution. Portraying the black body as something brute and primitive, untouched by the rules of Western rationality and order, allowed it some dignity in humanity while othering it past the point of a shared humanity with white people.
Because of this century-long conditioning, the notion of ‘human’ still evokes whiteness and in some way intellectual elitism even today. Those ‘misbehaving’ or acting outside of the Eurocentric ideal of white humanity are labelled even among white people. I
would argue that the term ‘redneck’ for example, is meant to discern the stereotypically rural and unsophisticated working-class people of the Southern United States from the more ‘civilised’, white populations of the North. Their supposedly ‘red’ skin is meant as a clear mark that they are less civilised and intellectually apt than their civilised white compatriots, rendering them less capable and deserving of humanity. Through the
Eurocentric teachings of the Enlightenment that have been exported into many parts of the world, the ‘human’ has thus become a synonym for the good-natured white citizen. The notion of ‘citizen’ is essential in the creation of the ‘human’ as a social construct, as it refers to the fact that this sort of humanity is primarily viewed as something essential and
exclusive to ‘civilised' homo sapiens. The idea of ‘civilised' once again evokes a white superiority over all other more ‘primitive', non-Eurocentric, civilisations. As becomes visible by this deconstructionist approach to the vocabulary of humanity, it is still heavily shaped by century-old ideas of white superiority.
3.Black Subjectivity
3.1. RepresentationIn order to understand the intersections of race and gender discussed in this thesis, it is important to acknowledge the abstract and fluid connotations that both words carry.
As discussed in the chapter before, Donna Harroway argues that true objectivity is ‘an illusion, a god trick’ (582). While I accept this to be certainly true for all knowledge
considered objective, it is especially relevant when it comes to the rules or foundations of society. The individuality of human beings allows for them to behave outside of defined and fully predictable behaviours and yet the concept of black subjectivity denies its subjects any sort of unracialised individual humanity.
As Cylena Simonds argues, this imaginary concept of black subjectivity creates a set of preconceived ideas of how people defined as ‘black’ behave and feel and translates them onto any black individual. It attaches a socially constructed meaning to blackness, assuming that black skin defines both character and behaviour in a way that’s unique to black people and not compatible with white standards. Even though the concept of black subjectivity was undoubtedly forged in the minds of white dominant powers as a means of justifying the alienation and oppression of black people, black subjectivity is not only propagated by white people. Through centuries of oppression and indoctrination by white hegemonies, people of colour adhere to it as well, accepting that certain behaviours are inherently black or white. This notion of ‘black subjectivity’ is thus rooted in the idea of the stereotype, namely an oversimplified idea of what a person or thing is but resides on a deeper level. Stereotypes are often more obvious as in defining a set of preconceived idea projected onto a group or community of people. ‘Black subjectivity’ however hurts the individual more than the group; it is a deeper and more dangerous version of the stereotype mentioned above and happens
subconsciously and systematically. Stereotypes such as the belief that black people eat more watermelon than any other ethnicity are thus definitely disrespectful and uninformed, but by targeting a group rather than a single person are less deeply rooted. Black
subjectivity however, implies that blackness defines character and is thus felt by an individual standing in for the supposed actions of a group. This belief in a ‘mythical collective black subject' is born out of the failure to recognise the two types of
representation defined by Simonds. As discussed by Simonds and based on Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, there are two types of representation; representation by substitution and representation by figuration. The difference between the two types of representation lying in the distinction between ‘a proxy and a portrait’ (Simonds 136). Representation by substitution relates to one element substituting or standing in for a similar one, whereas representation by figuration comprises of making the choice of ‘highlighting one particular relationship over another' (136). Representations by figuration thus occur when the differences between these two types are not acknowledged. They create an unmediated expression of embodiment or substitution and can thus create the belief of collective subjects that act and think alike. In the case of racialised subjects, this is especially common for people of colour who are often denied individuality for the sake of a collective black subjectivity. Racial subjectivity is thus constructed as a natural occurrence, failing to acknowledge a subject's individuality which is a key factor in defining their
humanity. Representation always implies mediation as it relies on subjectivity. Through the omnipresence of mediation, the question of agency arises both for the subject in question and the collective said subject is supposed to represent. Since the two kinds of
representations mentioned above work in relation to each other, they are often transformative rather than descriptive. Through the mediation of representation by
substitution and the subsequent figuration, a new image is created, often without agency from the subject’s side. Those unaware of this transformative power of representation take their own mediations of the represented subject for face value and see the substitutions and figurations as an embodiment of a collective’s essential qualities. Black subjectivity is thus rooted in ignorance and in the failure to question one’s own methods of perception for the sake of racial privilege.
I would argue that it is black subjectivity that makes white people call the police when they see a ‘menacing’ black man in their neighbourhood. Black subjectivity tells a white person that a black man in a white neighbourhood cannot be the ‘nice young man' they have met before, that he has to be someone dangerous (Rankine 15). It triggers the constant indoctrination, be it by the media or our general socio-cultural landscape, telling them that a black person is deep down always a threat. Even when there is no indication of a wrong, an unaccounted black person is almost always seen as a potential enemy. As Cylena Simonds points out, this mislabelling of individuals and communities based on the colour of their skin ‘arises from confusion with the related aesthetic function of
representation which is to figure meaning’. Assuming that skin colour defines character, those people ignorant enough to adhere to the standards of black subjectivity systematically alienate black people and perpetuate the vicious cycle of racism and ignorance. ‘Black subjectivity’ is thus a heavily visual concept that, in order to simplify interaction, reduces an individual to the aesthetic value of her or his skin, attributing to it a meaning that is based in the systematic alienation and oppression of black communities by white hegemonies.
Section II of Citizen, which is a collection of microaggressions suffered by the
anonymous narrator, offers a short, yet extremely poignant take on the narrator’s situation as a racialised subject. While there are the many awkward instances of microaggressions
reported in this section, one situation offers a sense of clarity to both the narrator and the reader. The narrator recalls philosopher Judith Butler saying that ‘we suffer from the
condition of being addressable' (49). Through this, the narrator realises that racist language and microaggressions are in fact only possible through the engagement of both parties. Since humans as social animals are conditioned to desire interaction, non-white people especially suffer from their hypervisibility as it leaves them constantly vulnerable to
unwanted interaction. Butler’s statement is undeniably true, just by existing we can and will be subjected to both pleasant and unpleasant, willing and forceful interactions. Citizen is a compilation of such voluntary and involuntary addresses and exchanges that the author indeed ‘suffers’ from. The lyric is a collection of cause and effect of not only Rankine’s own experiences with her addressability; it creates a sort of universal truth of the black
experience in the world but especially in the North Western hemisphere. Citizen reflects on the negative hypervisibility which in turn highlights the problematic idea of ‘black
subjectivity’ that creates a feeling of vulnerability and otherness many black people
experience frequently if not constantly. Cylena Simonds points out that from these aesthetic deductions attributed to the black body, the political and politicised representation of said bodies is created.
Section VI of Citizen reads like a memorial of such misjudgements and deals closely with these politicised distortions of black bodies.4 Rankine interweaves statements of former First Lady Barbara Bush with those of the mostly black survivors of Hurricane
Katrina. Through this, she contextualises the massive differences between black subjectivity and the black lived experience. The 2005 Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest in
recorded US history and affected the poor and mostly black communities of the United States Gulf Coast. The deplorably slow response of US authorities left those affected without any federal help for days and even weeks. As one unidentified voice claims ‘it was the classic binary between the rich and the poor (…) between the whites and the blacks’ (83). During a benefit concert for the victims, black Rapper Kanye West highlighted this double standard the mostly black victims were subjected to by the media. West’s off-script outburst directly targeted the portrayal of black people by the media, accused the federal government of purposefully neglecting the black communities and called out then-President George Bush for ‘not caring about black people’. West thus dared to voice the suspicions of those directly affected on live television in this incident that George W. Bush later called ‘the worst moment of his presidency’ (Michael).
Rankine describes this same racially motivated lack of compassion through faceless victims expressing universally human emotions ranging from fear to desperation and anger, being left to fend for themselves in the floodwaters. We as readers do not see who is in desperate need of help and naively ‘assume innocence, ignorance, lack of intention (and) misdirection’ (83) from officials. It is only through the analysis of the official management of the situation, that the reader finds out that the people in need are somehow not considered equal citizens, that they are in fact black. There is a necessity of visual presence to
understand what is happening in this part of the narrative. The fact that it is mostly black people who suffer, clarifies that their plight is handled far differently than that of white victims. Barbara Bush, the former First Lady of the United States, is quoted saying that she is worried that all the people displaced by the catastrophe are planning on staying in Texas where they received emergency accommodation. It is thus clear that even in a catastrophe, black pain is considered as less important than white comfort. On a radio show shortly after
Hurricane Katrina, Barbara Bush stated that ‘so many people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them' (Rankine, 89). From her position of privilege, the former First Lady thus allowed for the general white American public to shift their attention from the plight of these displaced individuals to the stereotype of the Black community as one opportunistic and threatening entity. By othering,
dehumanising and even demonising these grief-stricken people in such a way, the white influencers such as Barbara Bush and the many media outlets politicised the black plight in such a way, that it became unrelatable to the average white American. In No Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11, Lisa Finnigan points out that most media outlets focused on the typical portrayal of black victims as uncivilised and therefore almost undeserving of help. She notes one instance where AP ran a photo of a young black man wading through the floodwaters with a caption stating that he had been ‘looting a grocery store' while AFP had captioned a similar picture of a white couple as them ‘finding bread and water at a local grocery store'. Even media outlets adhered to the idea of black subjectivity, rendering a black victim more dangerous and untrustworthy than a white one by nature. Based on such reports, FEMA, a state agency created to offer emergency relief, is described as refusing to help the mostly black American citizens on the grounds of danger in the affected areas. These representations of black people as a danger to law and order led the administration to send in the armed military to control the highly publicised but actually not that prevalent looting before sending in help. They thus hampered the rescue efforts and were responsible for more misery for American citizens. Not only is black subjectivity thus a disrespectful concept, it can be a deadly one as well. ‘E Pluribus Unum’, meaning one out of many, the United States motto did not even apply in the country’s toughest times where white
interests and comfort were still valued over Black lives through the imaginary construct of black subjectivity.
Focusing on the visual allows for a discourse that alienates and generalises black individuals based on assumptions created by the white hegemonic groups in power. ‘Black subjectivity’ is an imaginary concept created and perpetuated by white dominant powers, that has been passed onto the black communities in question. This ‘black subjectivity’ has thus created a form of Black representation that renders difficult the distinction between the black subject of representation and the subject in representation. It introduces the ambiguity of the black subject being represented as something and the subject representing something itself. This binary is reflected in the analysis of the agency black people have over the way they are perceived addressed earlier in this chapter.
An exchange between the black female narrator and a white British man in Section VI picks up on this blurry distinction of the subject of representation and the subject in representation discussed by Simonds. At a gathering hosted by the white author, the narrator seeks to find a moment of peace and calm by wandering through the house. The host finds and invades her quiet moment however, and they engage in a discussion about the recent Hackney riots. This seemingly perfectly social moment reflects the white invasion of black moments of chosen solitude that are often discussed throughout Citizen, leaving the narrator barely a moment alone with her thoughts. However, it is not only the lack of privacy that is important to note here, but the ensuing dialogue that is immediately focused on race. While it is not explicit who started the conversation, it is clear that the author is interested in the narrator’s opinion as a black person, rather than as a fellow academic or friend. Focusing on her ethnicity, he assumes her inside knowledge on the Hackney riots, thus adhering to the idea of the ‘mythical collective black subject’ (Simonds 137).
The Hackney riots were a series of riots originating in the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a British man of Caribbean descent. A suspected drug dealer, the police had been surveilling him in relations to London gang violence and eventually shot him down. The reports painted him as a violent, armed criminal and the details surrounding his death had been vague and redacted several times. British people of colour especially felt that
systematic racism and a stereotypically negative portrayal of black men had negatively influenced these reports. The investigations eventually concluded that Duggan had been unarmed at the time of his death and that the one bullet fired at a policeman, that was at first used to justify the killing of a supposedly dangerous black man, was in fact fired by an armed officer. Similar to the beating of Rodney King in the United States twenty years prior, the shooting of Duggan was seen by many marginalised communities as a deliberately excessive use of force against minorities and thus riots ensued. Government statements and news coverage surrounding these riots painted the mainly non-white rioters as unruly and their reaction as disproportionate. By doing so, they effectively focused on the mythical collective of the disobedient black subjects rather than on the cause of the riots, i.e. the killing of an unarmed black man by police forces. Even though Duggan’s family had condemned the violence, minority communities all over London, and later the United Kingdom, were demonised as one hopelessly hyper-aggressive collective. While there were many different agents, the discourse surrounding the events grouped them all into one, essentially removing agency from the different black subjects in question.
The conversation struck up between the narrator and her host thus focuses on ‘black’ crime, leaving her feeling at the same time hypervisible as a black person and invisible as an individual human in a similar way her experiences in the United States had done. Her white interlocutor assumes that she, a black woman, was going to write about
Mark Duggan and the riots and seems surprised when she claims that she will not. He seems even more taken aback; even ‘irritated’ when she implies that he might write about it just as well (Rankine 117). While he seems to have a certain degree of sympathy for the dead black man, he does not assume that it is his place to write about it as he sees no connection between the two of them. It thus becomes clear that in his eyes, the black narrator should be representing Duggan through the concept mentioned above of the mythical black collective conjured by unacknowledged white misrepresentation. In his eyes, the black narrator is similar to if not the same as any other black people in general and her reporting on the riots that are considered as a ‘black’ issue is supposed to reflect the concerns of an alleged univocal black community. To him, her blackness is the key factor that unlocks a special sort of inside knowledge into black behaviour and the black mindset that he, as a man removed from black subjectivity ‘respectfully’ does not dare to comment on.
The alleged shared aesthetic value of the narrator and the victim’s skins thus confuses the white author into thinking that all people of colour share similar character traits and race-specific levels of emotion. He completely disregards the presumably obvious differences such as gender, nationality or other arbitrary features in favour of their non-white skin. In the eyes of the non-white author, a black woman can stand in for any person defined as ‘black’, regardless of her background. Failing to acknowledge his simplifying thought processes, the author thus substitutes the black narrator with the black victim and highlights their shared blackness over any other traits. He also fails to see that, following such a simplifying train of thought, he would be the better person to write about the
incidents as he shares more immediately obvious traits with Duggan than the narrator. Their position as male citizens of London could be a uniting factor and yet their skin colour seems to put them miles apart. This incident proves Simonds’ statement that ‘representations
produce new meanings, new figurations, but (that) they do not shift the dialectic’ (143). The author is willing to feel sympathy for the black body and makes subconscious assumptions about blackness, but he is not willing to look further than the threshold of blackness in order to actively change the dialectic surrounding the incident. The apparent cultural differences between both the author and the narrator and the author and the victim are enough to make him believe in the illusion that the black American woman and the black British man share essential qualities that he as a white person could never understand.
These instances prove that black people are often lacking individual and as well as collective agency, due to the socially constructed concept of black subjectivity and an institutionalised and subconscious mediation of black representation. Even though it is shaped by assumptions and deemed a social construct, the discourse surrounding racial subjectivity and racial difference continues to operate and affect real humans in the real world.
3.2. Performing Race
Within this framework of an established white socio-cultural superiority, the performance of race seems to be deeply ingrained and passing thus becomes an understandable reaction to the detrimental effects of racial subjectivity. Passing is the act of attempting to be regarded as a member of an identity group such as a race or class that one does not belong to, by altering one’s appearance and/or behaviour in accordance to said group’s norms or
subjectivity. Since racism is a heavily visual concept, those suffering from being othered, can deem the act of passing necessary in order to gain privileges that would otherwise be denied to them. Racial passing thus relies first and foremost on visual factors. People with
‘ambiguously ethnic’ or features considered as ‘white’ have the advantage of the benefit of the doubt. For those who are able to do so, passing can seem like a welcome escape from the arbitrary judgement of racial subjectivity.
There is a long history of people of colour passing as white in order to enjoy the same or similar privileges that white people benefit from. Be it for career purposes or to be accepted into different communities, passing can open doors, that racial subjectivity is tightly holding shut. Instances of white people passing as black are quite rare however since white people pretending to be black would not benefit from many; if any; privileges by doing so.5 This form of ‘infiltrating’ a different social group is often seen as deceitful and opportunistic by those whose privileges are sought out by the act of passing. It is felt as a coercion of the visible that threatens the simplicity of classifying and judging people by their physical appearance before anything else and thus as a ‘threat to constructions of race’ (Goggin 1). It is thus felt by the privileged groups as a malevolent disregard of the arbitrary rules they have set up. In ‘Passing: From Heathcliff to Oberon’, Joyce Goggin argues that female passers are seen as especially threatening as they not only threaten the established structures of racial oppression, but most importantly the ‘patriarchal script’ (Wald qtd. in Goggin 10). Women accused of passing are thus seen as especially cunning as they offend not one but two of the most powerful markers of privilege.
One prominent subject that has been accused of passing is Beyoncé Knowles who Is now hailed as a champion of black agency. While her latest visual album Lemonade was
5 Recently the case of the white American Rachel Dolezal gained prominence when her white parents called her out for falsely stating her ethnicity as black for over a decade. Her mislabeling which she explains by her being ‘transracial’, had allowed her to climb to the top of her local NAACP chapter and is therefore a rare instance of a white person benefitting from racial passing.
celebrated as ‘unapologetically black’ and has received praise from African diasporic
communities from all over the world, she has raised eyebrows in the past presenting herself as a light-skinned blonde-haired bombshell in the style of 1950’s pin-ups (NBC News). Even though she never went as far as to call herself white, which was among other things
impossible due to proof of her background, she did capitalise on the ambiguity surrounding her appearance. In an interview with Ebony magazine her own father has attributed part of her success to her light skin saying that darker skinned girls rarely stand a chance in the highly visual pop music industry. Beyoncé however had mastered the art of being
‘ambiguously black’; being black enough to appeal to the wide black demographic while at the same time looking and ‘acting’ light enough as to not threaten the white status quo of the pop music industry. Up until Lemonade, her success lay partly in her ability to bridge the gap between black and white subjectivity catering to both demographics without alienating any of them by catering more to one side of the socially constructed binary. She rarely marketed the stereotypical ‘black people’s anger’ Rankine addresses in chapter II, nor did she cultivate the ‘angry nigger exterior’ (23) often associated with black art. The Lemonade album for the first time introduced a Beyoncé that did not cater to the eroticised black woman under white gaze but one that was indeed ‘unapologetically black'. Presenting herself as a champion for both Black and women's rights, she used the power her decade-long ‘black ambiguity' had given her to speak out about the injustices she as well as
countless other people; and most importantly women; of colour had suffered for too long. In a sketch aptly titled ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’ (2016) the Saturday Night Live writers pick up on Beyoncé’s ability to ‘pass’ as non-stereotypically black and parodied the outrage that accompanied the release of the album. After the release and Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance visually inspired by the Black Panthers, many news outlets were
confused by this alleged sudden change in what she represented. They were confused by her literally showing her ‘true colours’ and embracing her heritage and some event so far as to say she was abusing her platform by stirring up an unnecessary debate on race. However one could ask whether the audience was seeing a different Beyoncé or whether they were seeing differently altogether. Beyoncé had always been black but in their eyes, she was now ‘acting’ on that blackness as well. Like Rankine, the SNL writers picked up on the idea that in order for black artists to be marketable they traditionally have to ‘act black’, meaning that they have to cater to the ideas of black subjectivity. Blackness in the entertainment industry is thus primarily associated with either content marketed specifically towards black
consumers such as The Oprah Winfrey Network or content that is subjectively black such as rap music. Blackness is thereby ‘tolerated’ as long as it is clearly labelled as such and can be contained and marginalised by the Eurocentric hegemonies.
Citizen dedicates great parts of the narrator's stream of consciousness with this idea of passing but addresses it on an abstract level rather than on a visual one. I would argue that the many instances where the narrator resorts to an internal monologue could already be counted as passing. By ‘refusing' to give into the expectations for blackness, she passes as ‘not fully black' in the eyes of her white environment. Rather than embracing the expected ‘black people anger', she resorts to internal monologues to calm herself down (23). One can barely call this the narrator's ‘refusal' to behave along those stereotypes as that implies that she actively has to hold herself back from behaving in a certain way. I would rather argue that the general focus on so-called black behaviour is so great, that any person not complying, is presented as actively fighting the urge to do so. Confirmed by Simonds, this mediation of subjectivity then ‘questions not only the possibility of individual agency but also of collective agency' (142).
Two instances in Sections I and III in particular highlight the absurdity of black subjectivity and the notion of passing that is so closely tied to it. Both address the
limitations of black subjectivity in the real world as they prove that once people are actually interacting with each other, black subjectivity does not hold up anymore. The two white people the narrator interacts with in these cases had assumed blackness was discernible from whiteness even by the sound of a voice. The first such instance takes place when the black narrator meets her potential new counsellor for the first time. Having talked to her only on the phone, she must have somehow sounded like a white person as the therapist is shocked to find a black person on her doorstep. Assuming the narrator’s ethnicity from her voice the therapist made the narrator pass as white by neglecting to acknowledge that race does not define one’s voice and attitude. The second instance of unintentional passing from the narrator’s side is made possible once again on the absence of visual cues. The bank manager the narrator had talked to on the phone does not manage to hide his astonishment at her being black when he finally meets her. Like the trauma councillor before him, he is ashamed at realising his prejudice and yet he has proven that he did not expect a black woman to be as articulate as a white one. Without actively attempting to do so, black people can thus be perceived as passing, as soon as they behave outside of their expected ‘black’ behaviour. This is then another way in which black subjectivity denies black people both individual and collective agency. Assuming that racial subjectivity is a natural
occurrence, those people believing in it, subconsciously assume the whiteness of a subject of colour if there is a lack of physical proof combined with non-visual cues implying
4. Visibility
Visibility is a central issue in Citizen; the recurring paradox of being invisible and hypervisible is one that follows the anonymous black narrator throughout the book. This binary is
derived from the unease that white people frequently seem to experience in the presence of the black narrator throughout the collection. As a body defined as alien by black
subjectivity, the black body seems to be perceived either as a danger or a negligible, unworthy entity.
Once again, the narrator’s interpretation of Judith Butler’s take on hurtful language serves as a key into understanding the power relations between the black narrator and the white people she interacts with. Rankine notes that ‘for so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person’, thinking that racist remarks were meant to make the addressee invisible or belittle them. Butler’s statement that ‘our very being exposes us to the address of others’, however reveals that such language renders the addressee hypervisible rather than invisible (49). The mere act of engaging with a
person to hurt them proves that the addressed person was perceived as hypervisible. This offers the addressee the opportunity to seize that power of hypervisibility and to take control of the situation. Rather than enforcing the idea that a racist address was meant to erase a person, Rankine argues that it can be turned into something powerful by rendering the person visible and giving them agency in a scenario that was meant to make them feel powerless.
To illustrate this, the narrator recounts two instances where, through the lack of language, black people were rendered invisible. In a short episode at the drugstore, a white man cuts in front of the narrator, admitting that he ‘didn’t see her’ when the cashier
it is clear that she is not visible to him without the mediation of language (77). It is only the power of language that eventually validates her visibility in his eyes. By using language, she affirms her humanity, as if she had to remind him of their shared humanity. An earlier such memory in Section I is that of a young black child being pushed over by a white man who keeps walking until the mother forces him to look at the son and apologise. She has to force her son's visibility onto the stranger, who proves that neither a black child nor woman are worthy of his attention. This brief episode contextualises the lack of agency often associated with blackness. The lack of visibility creates a state of dependency where black people have to force interaction in order to emerge from their ‘immaturity' implied in their invisibility.6 In a refreshing and rare moment of what could be called relief, other black men show their unity by standing behind the wronged woman ‘like bodyguards’ (17). While the woman and her child were invisible to the white man, they were not to the black strangers. This rare show of unity provides an insight into the levels of visibility between genders and races. These two recollections do not only consist of a Black and White binary, but also of a female/male binary. I would argue that the brief comment of black men standing up for an unknown black woman and her child, prove that racial visibility is more important than gendered visibility between the two groups. Both these instances prove that black women especially are invisible to the white gaze when they are not directly interesting for either
6 I use ‘immaturity’ for a lack of a better word in the English language. It is however not to be read as meaning underage or childish but rather in the German sense of Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit in German philosophy defines the inability of being autonomous and of thinking and speaking for oneself independently. It relates to the power of language discussed here, as it literally translates to ‘unmouthiness’, lacking the ability to produce an opinion. It is often related to emancipation, and thus important in the discussion of
colonialism and racism. This implied Unmündigkeit has allowed for Eurocentric powers to oppress and patronise non-white people under the guise of helping the less able people of colour out of their predicament of impotence by bestowing upon them Eurocentric
entertainment purposes, like Serena Williams highlighted in Section II and discussed over the following pages of this thesis, or through implied sexualisation.
One of the rare unsolicited addresses by a white man directed at the black female narrator confirms this invisibility of the black female body beyond entertainment and aesthetic purposes. The narrator is approached by a white man who generously notes that the narrator is ‘beautiful and black'; like his wife (78). Reducing her to her visual qualities shows the ephemeral interest the man holds in not only the narrator but in black women as a whole. Not realising that he uses his black wife as a bridge to find a single similarity between the narrator and himself proves that she is hypervisible to him as a racialised and gendered entity but not as a fellow equally worthy human. The black narrator’s interaction with the man at the bar is subconsciously shaped by the racist and sexist history of the objectification of black women by Eurocentric cultures. As Anne Anlin Cheng critiques, the history of racialised femininity seems to insist on a relentless story about the ‘coercions of the visible’ without questioning its own methods (3). By classifying the narrator in such a superficial way, the man adds attributes to her black features that are born from a colonial mindset. His use of the narrator’s skin colour as a bridge to start a conversation reproduces the age-old, Eurocentric approach to blackness by looking at it in the traditional colonial way of black versus white rather than by finding a bridge in their shared humanity. While this short episode can be considered as innocent and lacking malevolent intention or as a mere kind attempt at conversation, it is deeply rooted in institutional gendered racism. Like the man at the bar, the soft power exerted by Western cultures can’t seem to seem to find a common unconditional humanity as it is limited by the barriers of skin colour. By reducing the narrator to the colour of her skin, the man subconsciously fully analyses and dismisses her at the same time. He notices her physical appearance and thinks that he knows her
through the physical similarities she shares with his wife but through this, he also shows that her importance as a human is less than that of her othered hypervisibility. In his eyes, her blackness renders her interchangeable with other black women and denies her the individuality of her own non-racialised humanity. Even though this encounter barely stretches over five lines, it represents the standing history of the objectification and
eroticisation of black women for the white male gaze. By juxtaposing the drugstore incident and the fetishisation of the narrator on pages 77 and 78 respectively, Rankine comments on the almost comical gap between hypervisibility and invisibility. The black female body still seems to be trapped in a colonial idea of having to be of some immediate interest to a white male in order to be acknowledged. The way in which both women address the men that respectively wrong them gives them an aspect of agency however; mediating the way in which they are perceived confirms Butler’s statement that people of colour can seize the power of language and use it to define their visibility.
While her presence runs like a red thread through Citizen, Section II of Citizen is a close reading of Serena Williams’ career and analyses the way in which a black woman is seen in a highly mediatised, traditionally white and thus atypical environment. The racially motivated discussions surrounding her performance portray Serena Williams both as a champion of black visibility and as a painful reminder of the white discourse surrounding black achievements. Her black body in a traditionally white space is an excellent metaphor for the hypervisibility of black bodies in any white-dominated culture. Whether she is winning or losing, Williams’ behaviour is overanalysed to the point of patronisation and she cannot seem to exist independently from her skin colour. Her black body seems to get in the way of respectful and informed commenting, representing the media landscape of most societies ruled by a white elite. As noted in chapter 4 ‘Black Subjectivity and
Representation', the media plays an important part in the often-condescending portrayal of black people and Williams' presence in a predominantly white space is easily sensationalised in such a media climate. Any of Williams' actions or character traits is indirectly referred to through racialised language, leaving her to silently battle the constant verbal attacks on her black presence.
It is crucial to note that it is mainly the black narrator who suspects racist
motivations behind obvious bad calls by white umpires while anxiously following Williams’ career on TV. To the white spectator, they may just be bad calls that could happen to any player. Williams’ hypervisibility on the court thus represents the difficulty of navigating a white space without giving into (and acting on) suspicions of racism like she has managed to do throughout most of her career. It also represents the anxiety that arises from this
constant state of suspicion that many people of colour experience and that is voiced through the narrator’s stream of consciousness commentary on Williams’s behaviour in Section II. Even though Williams' temper is mediatised and scrutinised to almost ridiculous levels, her skin colour is never explicitly called out. Williams is being attacked without addressing the issue of race directly, leaving her to be called ‘insane, crass, crazy’ (30), when she does lose her temper. Unlike other sportsmen and –women, she cannot allow herself to call out injustices for fear of playing into the ‘angry nigger exterior’ advocated by Hennessy Youngman at the very beginning of Section II (23). The anonymous black narrator, voicing the fears and hopes of a broad black public, is thus in a constant state of admiration and fear of Williams’ hypervisibility. Her composure and achievements are admired but her outbursts are feared as they confirm the idea of an existing black subjectivity in the eyes of her critics.
As Serena Williams has stated herself, she has ‘represented a lot of different things to a lot of different people’ and her image, as carefully as she has crafted it herself has been debated and distorted for the past two decades (Haskell). Williams is thus one of the
eponymous black citizens the American Lyric gives a voice to. For a lack of information from her side, her actions are being patronisingly explained through her ‘otherness'. Playing a match on September 11, 2011, for example, her desire to win is attributed to her wanting to ‘prove her red-blooded American patriotism' as if she owed the American people proof of her citizenship and was not merely acting like any other high-profile sportsperson would by doing her job (31). Williams thus represents the modern version of John Henryism, having to be greater than great to achieve an ounce of the deserved respect in a white society.
Thankfully, and unlike folk hero John Henry, Williams has not overworked herself to the point of death, but she has worked incredibly hard and achieved more than most tennis players before her only to have her behaviour and patriotism questioned at every step of her career. Her extraordinary career represents the institutionalised mistrust and
resentment that follows many successful black people in white-dominated environments. Even after winning two of the three gold medals the U.S. tennis team could win during the 2012 Olympics, Williams’ black body was the main focus of Reid Forgrave’s commentary for FOX Sports. Allowing her no freedom to enjoy her victories, he felt it necessary to comment on her celebratory dance, juxtaposing her apparent and implicitly ‘black’ ‘Crip-Walking’ to ‘the most lily-white place in the world’ failing to mask his horror at a successful black woman in a traditionally white space (33). To him, Williams’ blackness and Compton heritage made her accomplice to the Crips, one of the most violent street gangs in the United States, disregarding that Williams herself lost a cousin to the bloody gang violence in Compton. As was the case for the Hurricane victims mentioned before, he recreated the
media's sensationalistic trope of racialising even the most universally humane and pure emotions of fear and joy. Feeding into the idea of a black subjectivity, Forgrave was incapable of seeing past Williams’ skin colour and projected onto it all the negativity associated with black people in general.
It is not only Williams’ skin colour that is hypervisible in this ‘lily-white’ place
however; her gender in correlation with her blackness is also of importance. While there are only a few women of colour on the major tennis courts of the world, it is important to note that black men are virtually invisible in the sport. I would argue that this is in part due to tennis being an expensive sport and a lack of promotion in schools but also to a more direct racial motivation. Black men are more easily accepted; if not expected; to play in less elite sports such as American football or basketball. These sports are of course more affordable but also historically not played by the white elites like tennis is. The tennis world is, as Forgrave put it indeed a ‘lily-white place’ and one could assume that the white elite running the tennis world would be slow to accept change. Since Arthur Ashe’s Wimbledon win in 1975, no black man has won a single Grand Slam tournament and male black tennis players seem to be inexistent on the important courts of the world. I would argue that next to the lack of accessibility for young black men, the issue of representation hinders black males from breaking through the glass ceiling. Black men are still considered inherently
threatening due to black subjectivity and are thus less marketable. A black man succeeding in a sport defined by etiquette and technique would threaten the still prevalent idea of the raw and brute power of the black man discussed in chapter 3 ‘Humanity’ as opposed to the more refined skill of the white man.
The scrutiny both Williams sisters had and still have to endure thus often refers to their physical appearance as if calling out their physical attributes and racialised behaviour
could diminish their talent. Their gender however has allowed them to be more readily accepted as other as it diminished the implied threat of blackness through the implied softness and lack of agency of women in general. Their gender prevents them from being seen as too threatening for white audiences, which is reflected by the commentators
juxtaposing remarks about their ‘black' behaviour with belittling, gendered language. Serena and her sister Venus Williams have fought incredibly hard to establish themselves in the tennis world, but they have rarely been considered worthy of their achievements. In an interview with Vogue, Williams herself stated that ‘African Americans have to be twice as good, especially women’ (Haskell) and that she has no problem in being just that. Despite her undeniable talent however, her behaviour is constantly explained and justified through dismissive language. Throughout her career, she has been accused of ‘bad sportsmanship' when reacting to injustices and Rankine notes how even her toned-down temper is commented on as if she has no agency in it (Rankine, 30). Instead of acknowledging her self-control, her good-tempered behaviour is diminished by patronising commentaries. She is called ‘a woman in love’, implying that the only way a powerful black woman can be tamed is through the idealistic Eurocentric idea of becoming the demure lover. Others decide that ‘she has grown up’, implying that a black woman in her 30’s needed years to finally understand the strict etiquette of the white elites and to become complacent (35). Her refusal to play Indian Wells for fourteen years is seen as another childish act of hers; belittling her statement against the racist abuse she suffered here as a teenager, as immature stubbornness. All in all, the commentaries highlighted by Rankine in Section II portray Williams as the modern equivalent of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’. She is depicted as a black woman who after years of bad behaviour and ‘acting’ black has finally accepted and embraced the rules of the white tennis elite. The
media reports pointed out in Citizen focus on her occasional lack of etiquette and paint her as a beneficiary of the moral burden of a benevolent white elite, rather than as the
international champion in her own right that she is. Even though Rankine did curate the excerpts of the reports in favour of her argument of unfair judgement against black achievements, they do represent the importance of media outlets in the creation and upholding of the hypervisible black woman.
The existence of such seemingly harmless acts of rendering black bodies hyper-or invisible analysed in Sections II and V are the result of century-long institutional racism. These acts are not always voluntary but are so deeply ingrained into society, that they are often brushed off by both black and white people, with detrimental effects on black
people's wellbeing as the narrator's constant state of anxiety shows. The whole narration of Citizen reads like a play between hyper- and invisibility and seems to define the black eponymous citizen’s life. Serena Williams’ battle with gendered racism is thus a one-woman microcosm of the felt experience of black women in American society. Her body is policed, and her behaviour scrutinised, while her citizenship must be proven and earned. Through Williams’ decade-long refusal to explicitly engage with racist critics, she has, according to Citizen, achieved full citizenship. For the narrator, the bleak conclusion to the lyric is that in a society policed by white hegemonies letting it go and moving on is ‘how you are a citizen’ (151). The dichotomy between invisibility and hypervisibility thus defines the black
