When the grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, they added to a lineage of injustices enacted against black people in America. Rumpus contributor Kaveh Akbar speaks to Claudia Rankine about her poetry collection Citizen, which explores the microaggressions supporting the system that let it happen:
I didn’t have a directive in the sense of raising consciousness. That wasn’t my intent in the writing. It was more that, if you look at the situation closely enough and represent it in the most honest and available way, if you make yourself available to it in its full complexity, it will also bring forward that discrepancy—the discrepancy between outrage laced with vulnerability and outrage housed inside privilege.
