“They’re already criminalized because they have black skin, but put on the hoodie and you have cemented that metaphor in the white imagination.” “We know that the hoodie on the body of a white person remains a hoodie on the body of a black person, it criminalizes them beyond the color of their skin,” Rankine said. “It’s one of those moments when history was, is, will be,” Rankine said at CA, revealing that the image was actually created in 1993 in response to the beating of Rodney King, which spurred the riots in LA. When the book was released in 2014, people assumed the empty sweatshirt hood, which looks mounted much as a deer’s head might be against a white background, was created in response to the tragic 2012 fatal shooting in Florida of the African American high school student Trayvon Martin. Rankine also spoke about the artist David Hammons’ piece “In the Hood,” which appears on the cover of Citizen. Responding to the others’ surprise and dismay, Rankine recalled thinking, “You wouldn’t say to me, ‘How did this happen?’ if you understood how anti-black racism works in this culture.” She became determined to break down the ways in which people are in collusion with racism in their day-to-day lives.

Speaking with students, Rankine contextualized her writing of Citizen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when so many people from marginalized communities, many of them African American, were abandoned. With parents, Rankine read from her upcoming book, Just Us: An American Conversation, an exploration of whiteness in American culture, and spoke about the creative actions of The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), a collective of writers and artists that she co-founded to capture, as the group says, “the enduring truth of race: it is an invented concept that nevertheless operates with extraordinary force in our daily lives, limiting our movements and imaginations.”

Rankine graciously signed books afterward for a long line of students and faculty, as she did again later that evening for a sizable audience of CA parents, alumnae/i, and friends. In her presentation during the school day, she illuminated some of the book’s most memorable passages and artworks for CA students. Through essay, image, and poetry, Rankine strives in Citizen to reveal and make palpable implicit bias and the mechanisms of everyday racism. On May 15, acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine brought to life the experience of Citizen: An American Lyric, an award-winning, genre-defying book of reflection, art, and cultural criticism, and a required text in Concord Academy’s sophomore English curriculum.

An american lyric claudia rankine