The first part of “Citizen” is told in the second person, which seems both a way of distancing the speaker from herself and of forcing the reader to be included, to be put in the position of “you,” the person who is at the center of this experience. You have a line in a later section of the book: “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane.”
That’s what I was trying for, the play on the idea of the second person, the idea that there’s another America. I also wanted readers to always have to position themselves relative to the pronoun. Who was talking about whom? Where do you stand relative to the information that’s being communicated? Because the “I” either puts you in that voice or allows you to reject that voice immediately: “That’s not me.” And I was trying to destabilize the immediate ability to say, “That’s not my experience. That’s not me.”
I also wanted to put a little bit of pressure on the sense of who has power, who can stand in that “I” versus who can’t, and, talking specifically about African-Americans, on the notion that we started as property. The notion that personhood came after objecthood, that the move into the “I” was actually — insanely — a step that had to be taken legally. — CLAUDIA RANKINE
How Chicago’s Cook County Jail Became America’s Largest Mental Health Care Provider
City finally holds hearings on Chicago mental health clinic closings
The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The white worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, a black auto worker, member of UAW [United Auto Workers], and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim [of the fascist terror] should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity! — ANGELA DAVIS
Supermax prisons may be the greatest threat to freedom in the United States today, both for prisoners and for jailers. Which is not to lose sight of execution chambers: in a death penalty democracy , all citizens are executioners. While various international human rights bodies condemn American executions and solitary confinement, they continue on, outside the sphere of public concern. The invisibility accorded the buildings and spaces that house these practices (the State of California would not provide any information — even the names of the designers — for its supermax prison at Pelican Bay or its execution chamber, despite our public records act request) further compounds their inherently transgressive nature. Something would have to break if we confronted the “worst of the worst” buildings we have designed and built. Does architecture — central to the realization of these spaces — have the courage to lead this act of introspection? — CLOG: PRISONS
I read somewhere that when the men of a certain African tribe met white Europeans for the first time, they looked at each other in surprise and asked: “Why has this man peeled the skin off his face?”
The military police, these men I saw in front of me, were no different. What power had flayed the skin from these faces? How had it been stripped off? Why? Where? I didn’t know. I just knew that these faces did not look like the faces of the rest of humanity, of our families, our friends. There was something not quite human about their features. I couldn’t put my finger on it — but it was certainly there. —MUSTAFA KHALIFA
Jamaal May reading Hum for the Bolt
when the youngest child moved out of the house there was
silence for a few days as we plumped ourselves in the extra
space with nobody observing us then we began to fight:
enormous frightening quarrels in which with a sudden
hatred and abhorrence we wanted to tramplerape and gut
each other – it was vicious and continued for days
in decibel even more frightening than the vocabulary
because one could yell from the other side of the house:
turn it DOWN you selfish piece of pigshit! a chair creaking:
fuck off cuntface! turning it louder just fuck-off! why don’t
you just fuckoff from my life you pathetic turdhouse! doors
slammed a plate broke by god I have always known you’re
a fucking barbarian somebody throwing crockery is lower
than worm shit something else breaking Jesus Christ shall
I moer in your airless head with psyched-up spines and
distorted mouths hands and knees we excessed ourselves
at each other no child crying no tender psyche snapping
eventually it all calmed down and I became aware of blood
in the toilet and that you had a certain kind of cough
in the mornings unobtrusively we began to bring our
money matters up to date and for the first time set
the burglar alarm at night when I fell asleep
behind the wheel and the tyre burst against
the pavement you found me like that
and held me for a long time too tight
like people in a trench
we have begun to look out for each other
one’s loss is
the other’s wane. — ANTJIE KROG
