The Paradoxes of American Citizenship in Claudia Rankine's "Citizen"

Glenn Ligon, Untitled: Four Etchings, 1992. Republished in Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, poet Claudia Rankine uses language as the medium through which to display the inherent contradictions sewn into United States identity politics. In doing so, her collection of “microaggressions” demonstrates both a microcosmic, if not insidious form of racial violence -- perhaps making it quintessentially lyrical as the subtitle suggests -- while paradoxically evaluating the long term political and social effects of such daily acts of racism.

Rankine begins one of the opening passages in Citizen by recalling a conversation between two friends: “A friend argues that Americans battle between the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self self.’” In a way, the battle between historical self and the self self serves as the current that runs through the collection, though it quickly reveals itself to be much less a battle -- two entities at odds -- than it is two sides of the same coin. It is, in other words, the inherent paradox of American citizenship. Indeed, the topic of American citizenship -- the historical and individual “self” -- serves as the site of abundant scholarship, including Dennis Preston’s accounts of American identity formation through language. He outlines such fundamental contradictions in the perpetuation of a standard US English, arguing that its propagation functionally promoted a “unified” American culture, while concurrently “othering” those deemed unrepresentative of such cultural illusions.

Moreover, the dichotomy between the historical and individual selves is perhaps typified in the strategically placed microaggression on the following page. In it, Rankine chronicles an instance wherein a nosy neighbor calls the police on a house-sitter over suspicion of his presence at the house. The poem culminates in an interaction between the ambiguous “you” -- the owner of the house -- and the house-sitter: 

...you clumsily tell your friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard. He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants. Yes, of course, you say. Yes, of course.

At once, this passage functionally displays the dichotomy between the individual and historical selves -- the fundamental differences that mark the lived experiences of Americans depending on their race. Simultaneously, it reveals what Ben Lerner refers to as Rankine’s deliberately interchangeable “you,” about which he argues, “Citizen’s concern with how race determines when and how we have access to pronouns is, among many other things, a direct response to the Whitmanic (and nostalgist) notion of a perfectly exchangeable ‘I’ and ‘you’ that can suspend all difference.” In other words, Rankine forces her reader to confront the historical or “unified” self, which is, at best, illusory in nature. Upon deliberation, she implicitly summarizes this ultimately monolithic perception of the American “you,” writing, “And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.” 

Paradoxically, Rankine seems to suggest that, if anything, these microaggressions -- these implicit, often subtle forms of racial violence -- are what perpetually mark the “historical self,” or the American identity. Indeed, as Preston corroborates, it is through the subtleties of cultural whitewashing and linguistic discrimination wherein America’s historical identity is built. The lived experiences of the self self are thus marked by the “othering” at the heart of the American historical self. Citizen ultimately makes this dichotomy obvious through its subversive use of the “you,” demonstrating that it can never be interchangeable with “I.”