Claudia Rankine makes a risky, but ultimately effective move, by employing the second-person in her “lyric” Citizen. The second-person point of view creates a dream-like quality in Rankine’s writing which works perfectly when Rankine describes moments from her childhood in part I of the lyric. Claudia Rankine presents her young self as an amalgam of Pecola and Claudia’s characters in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.
Rankine’s childhood memories, as recounted in Citizen, are reminiscent of The Bluest Eye’s portrait of black girlhood. Rankine writes:
Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would you call you by the name of her black housekeeper… you never called her out on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget…Do you feel hurt because It’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other (Rankine 7)?
Rankine questions her actions when remembering this microaggression. The moment is reminiscent of Claudia MacTeer’s encounters with her community’s idealization of whiteness. When she destroys the white baby doll, she recalls, “all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured… what made people look at [little white girls] and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me” (Morrison 20-22)? Both Rankine and MacTeer interrogate the ways they are rendered inhumane by the world as young black girls. For Rankine, her “friend” makes her replicable and indivisible from her race by calling Rankine the name of her black housekeeper. Rankine is simply “one of them.” For Claudia MacTeer, the world refuses to see her beauty, her specialness by viewing little white girls as the pinnacle of beauty. Claudia MacTeer does not accept the “white is right” mentality, as shown by how she questions little white girls’ beauty. Rankine tries to pin down precisely why her friend’s behavior bothered her. Both young Claudias subconsciously know that the societal behavior they encounter is wrong but can quite wrap their fingers around it. Neither is yet familiar with the history of white supremacy that might make the picture clearer for them. Both girls are constantly questioning, the passages scattered with question marks. However, neither girl receives answers in that moment.
Rankine also internalizes racism in a way that more closely mirrors Pecola’s character. Rankine writes that after incidents like the one quoted above:
An unsettling feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your back… Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet (Rankine 8).
The racism Rankine encounters doesn’t just make make her feel metaphorically sick but makes her feel that she as a person is sickening. The things Rankine endures (like the Freudian slip from her friend) damages her self image like how the things Pecola hears and sees feeds into her self hatred. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes and obsession with whiteness as the epitome of beauty proves the hatred she holds for her black self. Morrison illustrates throughout the novel how this self-hatred is produced by the Geraldines, Paulines, Shirley Temple cups, and overall societal obsession with Aryan looking little girls that Pecola encounters. Morrison also even writes, “The Breedloves… were poor and black and… believed they were ugly… it was as though some[one]… had given each one a cloak of ugliness, and they had each accepted it without question” (Morrison 38-39). The Breedlove, including Pecola, are all made to feel ugly (or sick, or disgusting, or wrong). Their ugliness is tied to their poverty, but more importantly their blackness. Their society rooted in white-supremacy – the magical creature with cloaks – cause them to feel this ugliness like the “wrong words” cause Rankine’s self-disgust.
Claudia Rankine’s childhood experiences mirror two divulging characters in The Bluest Eye: Claudia and Pecola. Rankine is interrogative at times like Claudia, but also susceptible to internalizing racism like Pecola. Rankine’s experiences exemplify how Morrison’s characters lie in real black women, and long past 1941 where Morrison’s novel takes place. Morrison’s novel shows that neither Pecola nor Claudia’s separate experiences define black girlhood, but that a little bit of each character can be found today in African-American women’s pasts.
