When Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric arrived in the fall of 2014, shortly before a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to charge Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s murder, critics hailed it as a work very much of its moment. The book-length poem— the only such work to be a best seller on the New York Times nonfiction list—was in tune with the Black Lives Matter movement, which was then gathering momentum. How, Rankine asked, can Black citizens claim the expressive “I” of lyric poetry when a systemically racist state looks upon a Black person and sees, at best, a walking symbol of its greatest fears and, at worst, nothing at all? The book’s cover, a picture of David Hammons’s 1993 sculpture In the Hood, depicted a hood shorn from its sweatshirt—an image that evoked the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. Rankine’s catalog of quotidian insults, snubs, and misperceptions dovetailed with the emergence of microaggression as a term for the everyday psychic stress inflicted on marginalized people.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2020-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2020-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
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