Claudia Rankine’s Citizen an American lyric is a quintessential example of the power of mixed media art forms. Rankine initially introduces the idea of a lyric in her title which reminds readers of music and poetry which offers an escape from the pressures and expectations involved in being a black American citizen. However, she decided to shift focus from words and sounds associated with lyrics to visual images by inserting illustrations in her novel that seem to provide the reader with a better understanding of the emotions Rankine is writing about. Rankine uses the images to replace the photos procured in people’s minds while reading the novel and insert her own emotions and visuals to their understanding of her narrative. These images however are so nuanced and require a lot of thought that the text seems to explain the image as if it was a caption in a picture book. One of the emotions described by an image were those the protagonist felt when she rang the bell of her therapist’s office and “when the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?” (Rankine, 18). At that moment the protagonist felt meek in front of the woman like a “wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd” (Rankine,18) and had to muster up all her courage to say she had an appointment. Rankine uses a wounded dog to describe her feelings at that moment because a dog is always reliant on others to sustain them. Dogs are the epitome of obedience because they have no other choice than to be subservient to their masters if they want to survive. However, the dog illustrated along with this story seems to have the face of a human which puts an image in the reader’s mind of how the protagonist is seen by the woman. The protagonist is not viewed as a complete human being rather a stray dog she quite literally tried to shoo from her property. The woman’s immediate instinct when seeing the protagonist is fear which represents how society views black people. But because the protagonist paints herself as a measly dog laying down on the ground in such a relaxed position Rankine is able to undermine the fear the woman experiences and paint it as completely unfounded. Despite the harmless display of the dog, the protagonist is still at the mercy of the women due to an irrational fear similar to that fear many experiences in relation to dogs. The protagonist is also disregarded immediately like a dog. This continues the narrative of being unseen by society that began with Sister Evelyn who “never actually saw you sitting there” (Rankine,6) all throughout school. The protagonist is vulnerable to what society thinks of her and must prove herself to get the decency she deserves. When she finally tells the woman she has an appointment the woman pauses and says “oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry. I am so sorry, so, so sorry.” (Rankine,18). However, right after this apology comes the image of the wounded dog which proves that the apology did no good because the protagonist still feels like an abandoned dog who is at the mercy of the world. Rather than being viewed as the black American citizen, the protagonist is the black American dog who is meek in society, spoken down to and disregarded. 

At the start of the novel, Toni Morrison only focuses on devolving Pecola’s narrative of her life. We witness all the horrors done to Pecola by her family and begin to despise them. However, Morrison understands the importance of subject formation specifically how her mother’s past and present affect how Pecola acts in her life. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, experiences a rollercoaster of acceptance and hatred in her life that can all be traced back to her loss of self-esteem when “a rusty nail…punched clear through her foot.” (Morrison, 110) Although this saved her from anonymity her floppy foot is the source of divergence from others around her. Pauline used her foot as proof for her “general feeling of separateness and unworthiness.”(Morrison, 111) Because Pauline feels unworthy she finds pleasure in organizing and arranging things from jars to sticks and stones. She always took the opportunity to arrange and rearrange items to make them beautiful. She felt fulfilled when looking after Chicken and Pie so when they go away to school she craves respect and pleasure at the hands of a man. When she marries Cholly they begin an idealistic life together saying that “she had not known me there was so much laughter in the world”( Morrison,116). When they move to Ohio, Cholly becomes “meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me all of the time.” (Morrison, 118) Pauline is no longer able to sustain herself by simply organizing her “two rooms and no yard” (Morrison,117) and gets a job cleaning the house of a while family who would “drown in dirt”(Morrison, 117) without her. This begins to disrupt her love of making things beautiful. She is defeated by the white family and Chollyto the extent that she no longer believes she can make things beautiful which results in her neglecting her own home. However, Pauline is still able to beautify the “affectionate, appreciative and generous” (Morrison,127) well-to-do while family’s household. This shows a theme that Pauline believe she could only beautify the nuclear family’s life with her own covered in grime so thick it was impossible to not be considered unworthy. This feeling is mirrored in Pauline’s experience with movies. She watched movies of “white men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses.” (Morrison,123) When she compared these images of pleasure to the reality of her life she begins to want to be something she’s not. She does not find beauty in her existence and try’s to fix her hair “almost just like” (Morrison,123) Jenna Harlow. She then “takes a big bite of that candy and it pulled a tooth right out of my mouth”(Morrison,123) which reminded her of the feelings she got when the rusty nail punctured her foot. Pauline felt so ugly she transferred that feeling to Pecola from birth classifying her as a “head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” (Morrison,126) Pauline’s insecurity stemming from her floppy foot leads to her attempting to beautify herself and the world around her through organization and attempting to mold herself in the white image of beauty. However, her failure in making herself beautiful leads to her projecting ugliness onto Pecola and explains many of their interactions and Pecola’s feelings of unworthiness in her life.

The invisible man begins with his head in the clouds, wrapped up in his own world. He “imagines he is lost for a moment” (pg. 262) while walking down the streets of Harlem that were covered in snow. He describes the snowflakes as “simultaneously forming a curtain, a veil and stripping is aside” (pg. 262). They seemed to cover Harlem; a neighborhood filled with African Americans in a sheet of “beautiful” white. This reminds the invisible man of who he was in the south, surrounded by white men who were trying to overpower him. This whiff of nostalgia comes along as he smells the scent of the home – “hot, baked Car’lina yams” (pg. 263). The invisible man is then overcome with pride and strength while eating the yam telling himself in a “wild and childish” (pg. 265) manner about how “Bledsoe would disintegrate, disinflate! “(pg. 265) if anyone caught him eating a chitterling. Overcome with joy over his progression from his old self he runs back to the cart and buys two more yams. Just as the invisible man feels as if he’s overcome his past, he is met with a reality check as he hears a woman cry “leave us alone” (pg. 267) as white men carry her things out of her home. While reminiscing the invisible man is confronted by stuff that takes him out of the world of make-believe. He is shocked to find the old couple being evicted exclaiming “they can do that here?” (pg. 269) With that realization, he is transported from his daydream of the south to the realities of the north. The old couple’s stuff, their pots, pans of plants, curling iron, a lucky stone, and much more compelled the invisible man to act. He begins making a spontaneous speech in an attempt in an attempt to become a leader for the crowd. His speech begins tied to the south and Booker T Washington’s ideas of black people just fitting into white society without trying to excel but, as he continues speaking, he grows tired of preaching being a law-abiding citizen. He becomes angry and sets forth a new narrative of how blacks are supposed to act in a white-dominated society and encourage them to uplift themselves. By actually speaking up he takes a mundane event and transforms it into the news. An eviction of an old black couple is exactly the event that remains outside the “groove of history” however the invisible man’s speech made it front-page news. He writes himself back into history with his words then psychically by moving the old couple’s stuff back into their home. The invisible man took their stuff, their home, essentially their life and gave it back to them. By turning the dispossessed stuff back into possessions, he was able to find a place for the black man within the grooves of history. This proves that to be a part of history one must find a way to write themselves in. History is not what happened rather it is what it told by the people in power. By empowering himself the invisible man became part of historiography and was able to incorporate his narrative into history.  Ellison understood the power of the written word therefore wrote the Invisible Man to incorporate the black narrative into history and give a voice to those who would have been forgotten.

While reading Invisible Man I noticed the development in the invisible man’s relationship with the black social justice movement through his relocation to New York City. While in the south the invisible man is surrounded by white people just trying to fit in. He feels as though he has to “cultivate friendly relations” with the “southern white man who is his next-door neighbor.” This is shown through his speech made at the battle royal. His speech is extremely rehearsed to the point where he is reading from the text without any care to what is going on around him. He seems to be a clown in the circus created by the white men around him however he continues to preach Booker T. Washington’s words as if he is reading from a script. He tells the black man to remain in his place in the era of Jim Crow by being a laborer and not advocating for further social justice. We can see that even when the narrator arrives in New York City he remains subservient to the white man, remaining in his place as a laborer in a paint factory. While working in the factory he observes that only a few drops of white paint mixed into black paint created the whitest white imaginable. He witnesses that whites are prospering on the labor of black people and this compels him to act. When he sees the elderly couple being evicted and essentially dispossessed in the middle of the street it is a great awakening for him. He wasn’t sure that heartless evictions like the one he was witnessing occurred in the north and it riled him up. However, his instinct was still to remain in his place and not break the law. He spontaneously made a speech for the whole crowd gathered compelling them not to attack the police officers and to remain the good law-abiding citizens they were. But when the crowd responded back angrily the invisible man actually listened to them. By taking the crowds’ thoughts and incorporating them into his speech he was transformed and became angrier with every word he spoke. The readers could almost feel him experiencing this turmoil internally about how he should act. However, his spontaneity and instinctual capability to connect with a crowd were what attracted the brotherhood to him. And as he is ushered into the brotherhood the new chapter of his relationship to black people’s role in America begins. New York City essentially changed the invisible man’s entire perspective towards how black people should act towards the law. Being in the city transforms him from a subservient, meek puppet who was not in tune with his surroundings to an advocate for the people, influenced by the people ready to act to get the fundamental rights that they all deserved.

Zora Neale Hurston in her work “How it Feels to be Colored Me” argues that white people are missing out on the joy that comes with being black. She flips Du Bois’ and Fenon’s arguments that black people are always reacting to a prior restriction of blackness compared to whiteness where blacks are subjected to white power and are called out in social spaces. Hurston simply states that white people are missing out. She describes an experience she had going to a jazz club with a white companion where she connected to the music in a way her white companion wasn’t able to. She believes that because white people have to tiptoe around issues of race and black people simply live it that makes black people freer. 

Hurston enjoys the drama and attention she gets by being black. She says that she gets “twice as much praise or twice as much blame” for anything she does compared to a white person. She holds the center stage and behaves as if she is performing for the world. Her perspective is that she has nothing to lose and everything to gain because “the game of keeping what one has is never as exciting as getting.” She views herself as the underdog with room to grow and do amazing things that white people can’t experience because they are simply trying to maintain their power. 

However, Hurston doesn’t believe that white people having power is absolute she thinks that trying to keep this power causes anxiety and makes white people fearful of blacks gaining power. This relates to Fenon who says that white supremacy was born because white people were threatened and wanted to protect their privilege. Hurston feels bad for the white man who is so threatened but the black man and has such anxiety about trying to maintain supremacy that he never actually enjoys being in power. She says that white people are worrying if they measure up to black people even in the most intimate settings like their bed or while they are eating. She states that “no dark ghost thrust it’s leg against mine in bed” emphasizing the greatest fear of white men, that black men will come and steal their women because white people cannot measure up sexually to black people. This constant state of anxiety and fear that Hurston paints the white man in makes the black experience seem superior. While black people are living rent-free in the minds of whites, their supposed oppressors, they are able to achieve more, create bigger spectacles, and exercise their power over white people because they can only grow from where they are now.