Claudia Rankine does this unique way of interacting with her readers. Claudia Rankine interacts with her readers by providing videos that go with these different situations. Claudia Rankine combine still and moving images from documented, and televised surveillance. This is a way in which Claudia Rankine interacted with her readers because it demonstrated clear acts of racism that are constructed into our everyday life. It shows the acts of what people went through and are based on individual experience. This not only shows how these situations reflects on how people are but also as citizens. Rankine talks about the ongoing situations of modern racism that is face daily. 

Reading the text and viewing it as a film is very different. For example while reading about the situation of February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin, you rapidly read through it. You feel the pain on how frustrating this was. However seeing it in a film is very much different. Hearing Rankine read the text while the video is playing feels different. The reader gets into it and it really makes the reader feel every pain of it. Adding the still pictures such as black face is very underwhelming as one can’t believe how much damage people do to one another.

This particular film does this thing in which it showcases the first scenes to be filtered with very warm colors, like colors that represent calmness. It then slowly transitions itself to a more blue filter and it makes you feel sad. Rankine choose this type of interaction with the readers because it makes the reader feel the emotions that is coming with this text. For example in this situation the beginning of the text opens up by saying “My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious”(Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Graywolf Press. Kindle Edition). Rankie starts off by talking about her brothers, she mentions how they are like everyone else they are regular people too. Her brothers don’t belong in prison, her brothers are fighting through life. In this scene in the film the lights are in the warmer yellows/oranges. When it starts to get more in the bluer side Rankine mentions words like raining, break, and good bye. “…Down. It was raining. It stopped raining. It is raining down. He won’t hang up. He’s there, he’s there but he’s hung up though he is there. Good-bye, I say. I break the good-bye”(Rankine, Claudia. Citizen . Graywolf Press. Kindle Edition.). All these words symbolizes sadness. The rain is always so gloomy, and goodbyes are always sad. Both rain and goodbyes go with the color blue, since sadness always is describe to be so blue. This made the text be read with more emotions and it made the text be more visual as you can see the feelings in which the text is going through.

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