In “Citizen: An American lyric” by Claudia Rankine, the usage of grammatical “you” is more frequent than “I” and other pronouns “he/she/they”. Rankine’s utilization of “you” is specific, the intent is to create an environment similar to one that aims to teach, make personal a situation the audience may not be familiar with. In this case, Rankine guides the audience to and through a series of experiences that taste similarly of bitterness and microaggressions that come with racism. The audience is told about their experiences; in one situation you are told about being chased away from your therapy appointment on trauma counselling, and then another where a passenger refuses to sit alongside you on a plane, and another where your neighbor calls the police to investigate a suspicious person in front of your house who turns out to be your friend. This is the lived reality for Rankine and for any others, and she wants to share this to tell you: this is what I go through, but this is only a small fraction of all my experiences with racism, with white comfort and guilt and their need for consolation, the witnessing of microaggressions, of solidarity, and so on so forth.

While Rankine’s use of “you” is stronger throughout the entirety of part I, in the anecdote recounting how a woman’s son is knocked over in the subway and the perpetrator leaves without an apology, the the focus seems to be on the person who tells the story, the “her”, and also the heartwarming feeling it brings up in the “you”. The audience is there alongside the “you” as it has been all along, but this situation feels different from others in that it not only wants to teach “you” the audience to look at themselves in this situation, it also wants to comment on a little bit of hope and love can look like, what solidarity looks like in the form of numbers and support as the woman takes a stand for her child and asks the stranger to apologize to him and men stand behind the woman like bodyguards, like “newly founds uncles and brothers” (Rankine 23). In this story, the “her” is telling the story rather than it coming from and beginning with “you” like it has in the previous anecdotes. This experience does not come from “you” but the situation is familiar and the lady’s purpose is too: both she and you want the boy to be seen and helped and apologized to. Both of you acknowledge that they have probably never seen that boy until now, have never seen any of you because you are not a “reflection” (Rankine 23) of them.

Rankine utilizes “you” to give perspective, to bring the audience into a situation in order to make them realize an important and intimate experience alongside her. Rankine chooses to share these experiences so as to get an important message across about her and many others’ lived reality marked with microaggressions, hatred, hope, bitterness, and so much more. By using “you” the audience is placed directly inside the story and they’re made to be connected to the events and experiences and thus cannot ignore the reality of their current situation.

The inclusion of Pauline and Cholly’s past is interesting, especially seeing how their experiences translate to Pecola’s perception of beauty. It feels like Morrison has created a scenario of intergenerational trauma, a passing on of pain and internalized disgust from parents to their offspring, kept alive through rituals of self-hatred and a deep yearning for what can never be theirs.

In The Bluest Eye, there’s a suffocating desire to become what one isn’t. We see the characters attempt this transformation through osmosis, acting, and other gestures. Pecola’s technique of trying to beautify herself comes in the form of consumption. In one scene, she drinks 3 quarts of milk from her Shirley Temple cup, an outrageous amount for a single person to finish in one sitting, and Ms. MacTeer spends all day ranting about it. Another instance of Pecola eating her desires: the Mary Jane candies wrapped with a picture of a little white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes whom they’re named after. Pecola says “to eat the candy is to somehow eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.” This act of eating to Pecola is to somehow consume the creature itself, to become the desired. She prays to be the lovable little girl, the beautiful doll that Temple and Jane are.

Pauline’s desire to be beautiful is also something that consumes her and evidently this desire, as if transferable by blood, is passed on to Pecola. Pauline’s unhealthy obsession with beauty, with whiteness is seen in the period where Cholly begins to neglect her. Instead of consuming what she would like to be, Pauline imitates it. She often took herself out to the movies and obsessed over the gorgeous actors, two of them being Clarke Gable and Jean Harlow. Once she even attempted Harlow’s hairstyle to match her in the film, but after eating some candy, she loses her tooth and gives up, lets down her hair and accepts her “ugly.” Even before Cholly, before the films and attempts to be something she wasn’t, Pauline believed in her ugly. She blamed it on her bad foot. That was why she took such a liking to Cholly, he treated her special, in a good way, he was attentive to her and her leg. He was her ideal man, the man she dreamed of in her fantasies. After children, Pauline found a job at the place of her dreams. The family is like her movies come alive, her reality is different there. It almost feels like she’s playing house, storing, placing, fixing, and being praised for it.

The pining for whiteness and beauty is eased for Pauline as she starts work at her new location. She’s loved there, seen as essential. She gets to play a pivotal role in a white environment and life is different, is good for her now. She’s finally getting to play the role she saw on films and this eases her. The task to continue her yearning, her unending desire to be beautiful, white, precious is passed onto Pecola, who’s own mother looked at her and knew she was ugly.

“On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” by Claudia Rankine offers valuable perspective on whiteness in writing and it’s persistence in the literary institution. Rankine brings to light whiteness and its interaction with race. While doing this, she breaks down the person of color’s experience in an white institution, and what that means for them as writers and creators.

Rankine beings by giving examples of tropes one might encounter when approaching white writers writing about race. All of these tropes are racist and ignorant in some way, and exude whiteness and privilege. Although these writers may be heartfelt and well-meaning, their way of thinking is harmful to themselves and those in reach of them, i.e. those who read their work on race. The high frequency of white writers like this adds to the alarm. The white writer’s defense of their writing is overwhelmingly narrow-minded. Their argument for writing on race and other perspectives is that imagination is a “free space” and creativity is transcendental, meaning race, social class, gender, etc are concepts that anyone can tackle because we are above them all. They believe they have the right “to imagine from the point of view of anyone I want—it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine” meaning their occupation as writers makes it so they can write about anything. Rankine provides the following argument: race is inherently a part of the imagination because our imagination is an extension of the self, which is undoubtedly attached to and affected by our experience with race. Therefore, when writers make the argument that the imaginary is not affected by race, they are wrong. She says this is not to say writers cannot write about race and from the perspectives of another, it is to ask them why they would want to inhabit that space and “what for… if and how.” Rankine also wants to ask white writers, what is the purpose of using other perspectives? What can you say now that you are using this perspective, and why would you want that idea out in the world, coming from that certain perspective? When white writers talk about the transcendence of the imaginary, they go looking outwards, to other races and lives. They do not look at themselves and their power over their imaginary and lived experiences. White writers writing on race who frequent other bodies and experiences should ask themselves why they write from such a position. If they think they have nothing interesting to add on the topic of race as a white person, they should look within themselves and get to know the bigger ideas and understandings that exist within them.

Rankine also provides insight on the way literary institutions remain in favor of a whitewashed system. They do this by asking for specific content on race from their writers of color, stifling their true perspectives and lived realities by creating a space and system that only accepts certain narratives and discussions. This kind of expectation can be hard for any writer to achieve. Not to mention the conflict and turmoil the writers must be facing about genuine voice vs. work demands. Literary communities also continue to value white writers’ feelings over the valid opinions and questions of readers of color. When people of color bring up a point in white writers’ work, the writers get offended and feel targeted, feeling that this person of color is coming from a political perspective aiming to attack them for being white. After all, despite what point is brought up against the white writers, their intentions weren’t to be offensive in any way, and thus the community rallies to support the writer. As a result, nothing worth talking about is confronted, in this case: whiteness.

This eventually leads to Rankine’s final point and goal: we have to untangle the idea of the racial imaginary that exists in all of us. Some of us have to do more work than others, but all pf us have existed up til now as consumers of a white narrative, and therefore our imagination has also been been affected. Noticing our biases and intentions is not enough, we have to work against the white narrative by following the true creativity inside of us. Ideas and concepts we might not understand but exist within us can mean something profound in someone else, or to the future world. Rankine wants us to write our truth, and to teach something. We cannot connect to everyone at once, so the goal of a universal piece is unachievable, but we can write to teach.

This text is beautifully written and only a tiny bit confusing. Rankine surely has a way with words; a topic like this would’ve been difficult to understand had it been written with an academic style, but her almost poetic, almost spiritual explanations and questions made me enjoy my time here. While reading this piece, I thought to myself many things. For one, just because you can write about something doesn’t mean you should. Another one: intent is not an excuse that can protect you, because by the time you discover the impact of your words, your audience who’ve read and digested your work have been guided to believe a certain idea that might harm themselves and/or someone else. At the end of the text I found myself reading the comments at the bottom, and the most popular one by Claudio Ferrara made me think, what would Rankine say? It’s true we wouldn’t have as many profound pieces of works if past writers had stuck to their lanes and written about themselves. Like Rankine said, our standard of good writing shouldn’t be based on the universal, it should be to teach. The pieces listed in Ferrara’s comment do that. Rankine emphasizes why white writers write from the perspective of another, why they use the racial imaginary to create. They can create without borrowing other races, genders, etc. I think Ferrara missed the point and felt called out.

Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928) shares a unique perspective on race through Hurston’s sentiments on living as an Black woman in a time after emancipation. She begins by recalling her childhood interactions with white passerby’s. Seeing as she lived in a colored town, she did not see many white people, but every time she did, she reveled in looking at them and being looked at. She remembers calling out and welcoming them to Florida, getting silver pieces from them in exchange for dancing and singing. After moving to another town in Florida for school, she acknowledges that she is seen as a colored girl. However, this realization does not make her feel any sort of way about herself or her life. She claims that she is different from the “sobbing school of Negrohood” because unlike them, who are busy lamenting on how nature has forsaken them, she sharpens her “oyster knife” in anticipation and preparation for life. The spiel that follows shares Hurston’s perspective on slavery’s impact on Hurston’s daily living as a Black woman. Hurston states that slavery is a thing of the past, sixty years to be exact, and since it is done and gone, she can live in the present as someone with opportunities for glory and recognition.

From reading this piece, one can conclude that Hurston is mostly unbothered by her skin color. Hurston’s way of living is simplified because she doesn’t connect her skin color to herself, she knows what she is and doesn’t see the need to prove anyone anything. Whatever comes to her will, and she is ready to make her own life regardless of her skin color and the difficulties that come with it. Du Bois is starkly different, he stresses over identity, being perceived, his conflicting American self and African self, authenticity, external validation and more. However, they are similar in that they both are ambitious, they have want to accomplish great deeds, and wont let their skin color get in the way, hence Hurston sharpening her oyster knife to make way and enjoy what she’s aiming for. In addition to not being bothered by acts of discrimination, she has adapted a kind of mentality called Cosmic Zora into her life. Cosmic Zora doesn’t hold Zora down to one race or time, and she is depicted as an eternal feminine. When Zora is in the vicinity of elegant and rich Peggy Hopkins Joyce, she activates Cosmic Zora and becomes a being unattached to a physical being, a kind of higher consciousness that connects Zora to the “Great Soul.”

Upon reading about Cosmic Zora, I went back to Emerson’s Nature text and saw that their lifestyles are similar. Hurston is more similar to Emerson than Du Bois is and this is possible because of both of their disconnections with society. Hurston and Emerson both want to look to the future, whether for ideas or experiences. Emerson says traditional and old ideas shouldn’t be the norm, and Hurston does’t want to be held back by her past and family history; they both value what the present has to offer. Emerson believes nature is the way to real enlightenment, and he is able to experience this due to his abandoning society and delving into nature. Hurston is able to separate herself from her experiences too; an act of discrimination is not targeting her, it is targeting her skin, and because she doesn’t think her skin defines her, she doesn’t feel any hatred. She knows she has more to offer, hence the paper bag ending. The paper bag example is to say that despite what we look on the outside, boring or ordinary, all sorts of colors, we all store both valuable and useless items: diamonds, dried flowers, and the like. This is Hurston’s way of saying what’s on the inside is more significant than anything the exterior could have to offer the world.