The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background.
In keeping with this indication that it’s difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called “Jim Crow Rd.” by the photographer Michael David Murphy. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesn’t forget this. The protagonist knows that her friend makes this mistake because the housekeeper is the only other black person in her life, but neither of them mention this. She determines that it’s either because her teacher doesn’t care about cheating or, worse, because she never truly saw the protagonist sitting there in the first place.Ĭontinuing to detail the experiences of this unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates an instance later in the young woman’s life, when her friend frequently calls her by the name of her own housekeeper. Even though it will be obvious that the girl behind her is cheating, the protagonist obliges by leaning over, wondering all the while why her teacher hasn’t noticed. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as “you.” A child, this character is sitting in class one day when the white girl sitting behind her quietly asks her to lean over so she can copy her test answers. A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives.
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