Citizen: An American Lyric

In Chapter 2, the writing shifts from poetry to prose, taking on the tone and style of an academic essay. The topic of the essay is Hennessy Youngman, a.k.a. the YouTube vlogger Jayson Musson, whose series “Art Thoughtz” educates viewers on contemporary art issues. Citizen focuses on one particular video of Youngman’s, in which Youngman “addresses how to become a successful black artist, wryly suggesting black people's anger is marketable” (23).

Releasing one’s anger in this way, the narrator of the essay, a likely stand-in for Rankine, is not a genuine feeling:

The commodified anger his video advocates rests lightly on the surface for spectacle’s sake. It can be engaged or played like the race card and is tied solely to the performance of blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations (23).  

Rankine ruminates on “sellable anger,” noting that selling fury comes at a price:

On the bridge between this sellable anger and ‘the artist’ resides, at times, an actual anger. Youngman in his video doesn’t address this type of anger: the anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggle against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color. This other kind of anger in time can prevent, rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness (24).

The essay concludes on a more personal note, shifting back to the second-person: “You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints” (24).

This idea of “insanity” bridges the gap between the Youngman essay and the essay on tennis player Serena Williams that follows. Discussing an incident at the 2009 Women’s U.S. Open semifinal, the essay focuses on the moment when Serena becomes visibly enraged after a referee makes an unfair call: “Serena in HD before your eyes becomes overcome by a rage you recognize and have been taught to hold at a distance for your own good” (25). Rankine, noting Serena’s anger displayed on the screen, thinks that this behavior:

suggests that all injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives. Nothing, not even the repetition of negations (‘no, no, no’) she employed in a similar situation years before as a younger player at the 2004 U.S. Open, prepares you for this (25).

As a black woman athlete in a predominantly white sport, Serena has suffered from racialized slights, insults, and unfairness throughout her entire career. Rankine recognizes that Serena’s outburst is the direct result of years of mistreatment: “Oh my God, she’s gone crazy, you say to no one” (25).

Returning to Youngman’s suggestions on how to be a successful black artist, Rankine concludes by interpreting Caroline Wozniacki’s deplorable actions through that prism: “Be ambiguous, be white” (36). Wozniacki, the reader learns, is a Danish tennis player that ridiculed Serena Williams by padding her own bra and backside with pillows to mock Serena’s voluptuous figure. Again, Youngman’s advice to “be white” increases in relevance:

Wozniacki, it becomes clear, has finally enacted what was desired by many of Serena’s detractors, consciously or unconsciously, the moment the Compton girl first stepped on the court […] At last, in this real, and unreal, moment, we have Wozniacki’s image of smiling blond goodness posing as the best female tennis player of all time (36).