Rankine, Claudia

"At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, [the author] explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers--each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth--and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. [This book] is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness"--Provided by publisher.

"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society."--from publisher's description.

Introduces the works of thirteen contemporary poets along with a brief statement of purpose by each poet, critical essays by a number of literary scholars, and a CD of each poet reading their work.