Claudia Rankine Books

I began this lyric with ordinary encounters—the ones many would dismiss as trivial. When someone confuses you for another Black colleague, when a friend says something offhand and suddenly the air tightens, when you are told you are overly sensitive—it is in those seconds that a lifetime accumulates...

From Citizen: An American Lyric

From the private slights, I move toward public ruptures—the names that become hashtags, the faces we see looped on television until familiarity turns into erasure. Each incident of racial violence becomes a rehearsal of national identity: the spectacle of grief met with disbelief, the question of wh...

From Citizen: An American Lyric