In the year 2014, Claudia Rankine published her book of poems, Citizen: An American Lyric, which is now known as part criticism and part poetry. Several reviews describe Citizen as a racially charged criticism of the human experience. Citizen managed to raise a lot of questions and possible answers as well, almost, if not all, dealing with the issue of race. Just as many other writers, Rankine now takes the opportunity to share her thoughts in interviews and discussions. The speaker introducing Rankine, Professor Monica Ferrel, described Rankine’s work as having the quality of “the one rendered as the many and many one.” Thursday, September twenty-second, Rankine visited SUNY Purchase to offer the students an opportunity to hear a reading from her and take part in a discussion.

Rankine began the reading and discussion with the image of a hood seperated from a sweatshirt. She discussed the slippage of relevance when referring to the subject meant to be represented in this photo. She did say that this was, however, not a new dynamic. The photo is a piece by David Hammons. She then displayed and discussed a few of his others works. For example, after showing a photo of a jeweled, decorative basketball hoop, Rankine said that the basketball hoop “functions as a metaphor for the unattainability of that kind of fame for men in the inner city.”

Rankine continued the event by reading the first piece from Citizen with the image of a street sign that reads “Jim Crow Rd” displayed on the projector. This photograph was taken by Michael David Murphy. In this first piece, Rankine attempted to recall the first memory she had of being seen as a black person and “rerouted into white acceptability.” She then described how, even to this day, laws try as hard as they can to maintain segregation, while also stating that white supremacy is a part of American society. Then she explained the creation of many of the other works in the book. The other pieces were made by asking her friends to describe a time when they were doing something ordinary and someone said something to them where they, to quote Rankine, “are being thrown into white racism around black bodies.”

Next, Rankine displayed images of taxidermist works with casts of human faces placed on them. She spoke of how African Americans were, and are, racistly compared to monkeys, and explained how she thought to pick a new animal to represent the black community, an animal that knew to fear human wrath. So, she chose the deer. She next spoke of racist insults directed at the Rutgers basketball team and of how the white woman in the iconic picture of the team was edited out of the photograph. Rankine ended the discussion by bringing attention to two pictures of a lynching from 1930, one of which had the hanging bodies edited out of the photo. The event was a racially charged evening, but it was very enlightening, and full of intellectually stimulating discussion.