{"id":1845,"date":"2023-12-21T16:48:49","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T16:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/americanists\/?p=1845"},"modified":"2023-12-21T16:48:49","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T16:48:49","slug":"forget-all-that-the-world-says-61","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/americanists\/2023\/12\/21\/forget-all-that-the-world-says-61\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Forget all that, the world says’ (61)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A history of racism in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em> (2014)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2017 the #MeToo movement was booming across social media, following the onslaught of allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. Many big-name celebrities came forth online to share their own stories and show solidarity in the face of sexual abuse, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lawrence, and Uma Thurman to name a few. American actress Alyssa Milano encouraged the use of the hashtag in October 2017, writing that \u2018If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote \u201cMe Too\u201d as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem\u2019. With such big stars leading the movement we now, six years later, associate #MeToo with Hollywood.<\/p>\n\n\n

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However, the #MeToo movement was actually birthed on MySpace in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, an African American woman who used her own history of sexual violence to support and empower other young girls in marginalised communities. Despite receiving accolades from Time<\/em> magazine as a female activist and \u2018silence breaker\u2019 in 2017, Burke\u2019s name and intention has been lost among the names and stories from (predominantly white) Hollywood stars. Only a year later, Burke claimed that \u2018The No.1 thing I hear from [black, Hispanic and Native American women] is that the #MeToo movement has forgotten us.\u2019 She added, \u2018We are the movement, and so I need you to not opt out of the #MeToo movement\u2026Stop giving your power away to white folks\u2019 (qtd. in Riley, usatoday.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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‘We are the movement …
Stop giving your power away to white folks.’
<\/p>(2018)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Christelle Ram uses Burke and the #MeToo movement as a key example in her essay, ‘Black Historical Erasure’ (2020). Ram broadens out the affair by reminding us that \u2018The #MeToo movement was partly inspired by the widespread sexual violence experienced by slave<\/span><\/strong> women and men\u2019 (25). Here, Ram asserts that sexual violence is inherently a racial<\/strong><\/span><\/em> issue, having roots in slave history as a \u2018tool of violence and dominance\u2019 (26). The erasure of black voices amidst the 2017 #MeToo movement therefore displaces both the history of the movement and the individuals it was made for. The slave women who endured this violence lacked the agency to have \u2018their narratives or stories reported or recounted\u2019 (26); the black, Hispanic and Native American voices of the #MeToo movement in this seemingly \u2018post-racial\u2019 society have similarly had their narrative and stories usurped by the affluent white voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 2017 #MeToo movement took place three years after the publication of Claudia Rankine\u2019s book, Citizen: An American Lyric <\/em>(2014), <\/em>and yet the events of the movement speak to the themes explored in Rankine\u2019s book. Her lyric is concerned with issues surrounding memory and erasure, as well as the body and violence. As early on as page 7, when describing a racial \u2018slippage\u2019 between two young close friends, Rankine writes that \u2018your fatal flaw [is] your memory\u2019.<\/strong> Soon after this she describes a racially charged instance between two people in a car, a moment which \u2018you drive straight through\u2026acting like this moment isn\u2019t inhabitable, hasn\u2019t happened before, and the before isn\u2019t part of the now<\/strong>\u2019 (10). In these instances, Rankine is interested in exploring a form a racism very different to the sexual violence enacted upon black female bodies; rather, she speaks to \u2018ordinary\u2019 or \u2018intimate moments\u2019 of day-to-day life where racism raises its head in surprise (Mormorunni 6). Rankine exposes this form of \u2018casual\u2019 or \u2018acceptable\u2019 racism as having sprouted from a deep and longstanding history of racism, rooted in slavery. As the reader works their way through, and is pulled into, these intimate and ordinary moments they become increasingly aware of the fact that the \u2018before\u2019 is still very much a part of the \u2018now\u2019; that \u2018the body has memory\u2019 (28), in fact there is an \u2018historical self\u2019 (14), and that the past cannot be put behind you as it is \u2018buried in you\u2019 (63).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Rankine is able to quite literally pull the reader into these scenarios through her \u2018disorienting pronoun play\u2019 (Mormorunni 10) where she conflates the \u2018you\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019 of the story, making her own experience ours (11). Who the \u2018you\u2019, \u2018I\u2019, \u2018he\u2019, \u2018she\u2019, or \u2018they\u2019 refers to is never quite clear, making the reader do the work to decode the scenario and further implicate the reader in their involvement in the unfolding moment. However, the pronoun play does more than pull the reader into the racist scenario: these fractured pronouns point towards a fractured sense of identity for the black individual living against \u2018a sharp white background\u2019 (Rankine 52-3). A number of times throughout the book Rankine refers to this feeling of \u2018displacement\u2019 (153), the \u2018feeling [that] you don\u2019t belong so much to you\u2019 (146).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sleeping Heads<\/em>, Wangechi Mutu 2006<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I find that this concept is best explored through the art Rankine choose to include in the book, namely Kate Clark\u2019s Little Girl<\/strong><\/em> (19) and Wangechi Mutu\u2019s Sleeping Heads<\/em> <\/strong>(147). Rankine states that these pieces were important to her work as they \u2018performed, enacted, and depicted something ancient that I couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t want to do in language\u2019 (qtd. in Clark, kateclark.com<\/a>). Both pieces bring together that which doesn\u2019t belong together, they are \u2018wrong\u2019 and appear disturbing to a certain level. Clark\u2019s Little Girl<\/em> sculpture, which depicts a black girl\u2019s face attached to a taxidermized infant caribou, is particularly interesting to me as it speaks to a number of themes explored throughout the lyric. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The uncanny or \u2018Unheimlich\u2019 nature of the sculpture mirrors the narrator\u2019s feeling of displacement from oneself, whilst also evoking the sense that one is hunted, weak, and defenceless. Most importantly, however, for Rankine it reminds her that her \u2018historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal\u2019<\/strong>. She goes on to say; \u2018So when someone says, \u201cI didn\u2019t know black women could get cancer,\u201d which was said of me, I see that I am not being seen as human\u2019 (qtd. in Clark). Ultimately, for Rankine the casual and acceptable racist \u2018slippages\u2019 that she encounters in ordinary day-to-day life cannot be detached from the longstanding history of racism that is rooted in slavery. Little Girl <\/em>speaks to both the present, seemingly \u2018ok\u2019 racism that sees her as something slightly different to human, and<\/em> to the brutal history of slavery, the violent treatment of black people as literal objects and animals, of which the latter stems from.\u00a0(Left: Little Girl, <\/em>Kate Clark 2008)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Using an array of written and visual art forms, Citizen <\/em>is able to express the belief that racism is not only ever present in society but is, in its \u2018lesser\u2019 and more acceptable forms, still rooted in the legacies left from slavery. For many like Rankine, to believe in a \u2018post-racial America\u2019 is to ignore this legacy and history, as if it does not still impact the lives of those who live in a society formed from it. The usurpation of the #MeToo movement by the white affluent voice provides a contemporary example of how an inherently racial issue can be stripped of its history and thus displace the victims of that history. Rankine poignantly ends her book with The Slave Ship<\/em>, pointing towards the truth that all forms of contemporary racism starts and ends with the legacy of slavery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Slave Ship, <\/em>Joseph Mallord William Turner circa 1840.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bibliography<\/h3>\n\n\n\n