There’s the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we’ve evolved. We want to erase the nightmarish truth that at one time, we were the kind of people who would inflict unspeakable cruelties to another human being…Rankine’s Citizen demands that we not look away.
For NPR, Syreeta McFadden writes about why Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is critical to current discussions on race.