Claudia Rankine’s National Book Award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric is a testament to how far we have to go as a nation to move past the racism that still shapes too much of our culture. The book is a series of brief anecdotes from Rankine’s daily life, offered with little or no preamble, each of which expresses the casual and at times flagrant racism Black folks regularly face. She addresses some of the explicit—but by no means exceptional—situations that have received media attention in the last few years—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner—but the bulk of the book deals more with the microaggressions performed on a daily basis, the situations white America doesn’t want Black people to make a fuss about, the things that can seem so minor they might not normally seem worth mentioning. Rankine mentions them. She challenges the reader to experience what she experiences and then still try to call them minor – to be erased from a situation because you’ve been made invisible, to have your credit card handed back to someone else because the cashier didn’t assume you would have one, to have a passerby cringe away from you in fear on the sidewalk, to be pulled over for the apparent crime of driving while Black. And on and on. These things are small, and their enormity is crushing.

In one particularly poignant piece, Rankine speaks to the stunning and appalling regularity with which Black persons are killed by law enforcement in cases of “justifiable homicide,” a rate that far outstrips their population percentage relative to whites and other races in America:

In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis
In Memory of Eric Garner
In Memory of John Crawford
In Memory of Michael Brown
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory
In Memory

And then, on the facing page:

Because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying

And that’s it, isn’t it? The failure of the white populace to police their (I, my) imagination is a penalty paid for with a harsh currency – the marginalization (and blood, far more often than receives media attention) of persons of color. Black pain pays for white comfort far more often than the comfortable would care to acknowledge.

There’s nothing else I can really say here. Claudia Rankine’s voice certainly does not need mine speaking for it, much less over it. Please, reader: listen. Pick up Citizen and listen.