Citizen: An American Lyric

Rankine opens Citizen with a quiet moment describing a “you” lying in bed at night, looking out the window, recalling memories. This guide will refer to the person being described by the second-person address (the “you”) as the subject.

Rankine describes the subject’s experience in Catholic school when they were twelve years old: “You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind you asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written” (5). The subject is then a young black girl at Catholic school who has an encounter with a white girl. The white girl cheats from the black girl’s schoolwork. The subject recalls these two little girls, thinking with muted sadness about how the little white girl cheated without punishment.

Moving away from the memory of the two girls, Rankine describes a more embodied feeling: “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs” (7). The subject takes an inventory of their physical sensations after experiencing a racist encounter. Rankine describes an incident in which a white friend refers to the subject by the wrong name: “Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life” (7).