In the two weeks since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Langston Hughes’s 1938 poem “Let America Be America Again” has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Poets.org, the Web site affiliated with the Academy of American Poets. Hughes, one of the foremost writers of the Harlem Renaissance and a prime representative of that movement’s cosmopolitan humanism, was born in 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, a town near the border with Oklahoma. The following year, Thomas Gilyard, a black “tramp” who had been arrested and charged with murdering a policeman, was dragged from the Joplin jailhouse by a white mob wielding sledgehammers and a battering ram, and hanged, to cheers, from a nearby telegraph pole. The mob then swept through the town, driving black residents from their homes and looting and burning the empty houses. A few weeks later, according to one report, those who dared to return “ordered a law and order league and pledged their cooperation with the officers to drive from the state all bad characters”—not of the kind who had done the killing but of the kind who had been killed.
“Let America Be America Again,” with its famous parenthetical—“(America never was America to me)”—is an anthem for a split nation, a nation that, nevertheless, in Hughes’s words, can’t stop trying to fulfill its own hopeful mythology to “bring back our mighty dream again.” On Thursday morning, I spoke on the phone with the poet Claudia Rankine, who was visiting St. Louis and Ferguson, about Hughes’s poem, and about Rankine’s new book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” which will be published in October by Graywolf Press. “Citizen” opens with a series of vignettes, written in the second person, that recount persistent, everyday acts of racism of a kind that accumulate until they become a poisonous scourge: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you. Rankine writes, too, about famous figures, like Serena Williams and Zinedine Zidane, both of whom have been scrutinized and condemned for “acting out” in the public eye; in a series of scripts for “Situation videos,” a collaborative project with her husband, the photographer and filmmaker John Lucas, she sings of others whose suffering demands the world’s attention: Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, those forced to submit to stop-and-frisk, those left behind during Katrina.
“To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background,” Rankine writes, riffing on Zora Neale Hurston’s line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Elsewhere, Rankine describes a man knocking over a black boy in the subway, and the mother’s demand that he look at her son and apologize: “You want the child pushed to the ground to be seen.” The condition that she describes is one of being alternately invisible and “hyper-visible,” watched too closely or not seen at all. So it is with the book’s cover image, a black hood like the kind that Martin wore. Here, detached from the rest of the sweatshirt, framing air rather than a face, it might belong to the Grim Reaper. We see the symbol but are left looking for the person that it represents.
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Can you tell me when you came to Ferguson, and why?
I had no idea that I was coming to Ferguson. I was invited by the Pulitzer Foundation months and months ago, to come here and show some videos that I do with my husband, called “Situation videos.” So this trip was scheduled long before Ferguson was “on the map,” let’s say. Ten days ago, when Michael Brown was shot in the head twice, with the additional other four shots to the body, I realized that I was coming here. So then I extended my trip a few days so I could go to Ferguson.
I’m staying in a hotel in St. Louis. After I get off the phone with you, I’ll drive up to Ferguson with a reporter from the Spectator, and we’re going to go to coffee shops and just ask people what they’re thinking right now and how they’re feeling. I think it’s interesting because so far the people I’ve spoken with—the black people, the African-Americans that I’ve spoken with—there’s something about the fact that Michael Brown was shot in the head twice that they can’t—that’s the sticking point. Not that the first bullet wasn’t a problem. But the sort of execution-style shooting takes it to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around. There’s that video of the police just pacing back and forth and the uncovered body just lying there for hours; where no ambulance, no anything.
The poem “Let America be America Again” has been seen tens of thousands of times on Poets.org over the past few days—more than thirteen thousand people have read the poem on the site, and twenty-five thousand have come to it through social media.
Langston Hughes, for me, was always the poet of the people. There actually were some interesting controversies between him and others around writing from the voice of working-class people versus the “talented tenth,” but he’s always expressed the feeling of the man on the street. And that poem “Let America Be America Again”—what’s important in that poem is that he says, “America never was America to me.” The poem calls for an America that has never existed for certain segments of the population, to try to arrive there. It addresses that aspirational moment in the hearts and feelings of African-Americans and minorities who walk around every day, thinking—knowing—that there are two Americas, and there have always been two Americas.
The line “America was never America to me” has been in my head ever since I read the poem, probably in elementary school. Going back and rereading it now, I realized that I hadn’t remembered how inclusive it is of groups that have been excluded: “I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. / I am the worker sold to the machine. / I am the Negro, servant to you all. / I am the people, humble, hungry, mean.”
Yeah, it opens up to all minorities, to poor people, to anybody who’s outside of mainstream white privilege. I think that was his intent, to say: there is an America, but there are many, many groups that don’t have access to that America.
It’s profoundly optimistic to imagine this joining of groups together. You can almost see them standing hand in hand, in a line, saying, “Here we are.”
One of the things, in “Citizen,” that I was trying to circle around is that sense that there is an odd reality where people feel that “that’s not my problem.” And, in fact, it is your problem, because you can see it, because we all live it. We experience it differently, but it’s all of ours. The killing of Michael Brown is experienced differently in the body of a black man, and in the body of a black woman, and in the body of an Italian man, and in the body of a French woman. But we’re all experiencing it, and we all, on some level, have to negotiate it.
I don’t want to be naïvely optimistic. But I do think that one of the great things about social media today is that we can all see, at least, what it looks like. And hear from everybody. And then you have to decide whether you’re going to be silent or whether you’re going to stand in the corner and let things happen. But at least we know about it.
Going on Twitter can be like stepping into a room that you didn’t know existed.
And even the circulation of the Langston Hughes poem, the way in which poetry allows for the expression of a kind of feeling that is always underground, is almost like an underground electricity or current.
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.
There are a number of moments in the book where the speaker realizes that the “you” actually means “me.” I’m thinking of moments that describe what you call “the buildup of erasure,” moments where the speaker is not seen at school, or at the drugstore, or by colleagues who are talking about black people as if no black person is there, and suddenly she says, “That’s me. I’m the one who is the you here, I’m the one who’s being spoken about.”
“I’m on the outside.” That sense of dissociation has been, a little bit, my experience, because you assume, if you’re participating in certain things, the fact that you’re there, you’re seen. And then you realize: no no, no. However it happens that you happen to be in the room doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re in the room.
How did “Citizen” come about?
I started working on “Citizen” as a way of talking about invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast. They go by at lightning speed, and you begin to distrust that they even happened, and yet you know that you feel bad somehow. My husband is a great fan, or used to be a great fan, of Tiger Woods, and so I started by watching a lot of golf tournaments. I am a great fan of the Williams sisters, and I would watch tennis. You began to see a lot of little moments, and they would happen, and they would happen, and they would happen, at the U.S. Open and at various other Grand Slams, and I thought, “I’m going to start documenting these.”
And as I began documenting them in Serena Williams’s playing life, I started doing it in my own life. Then I started interviewing people and asking them for stories in their lives. I specifically said, to people I met and to friends, “Tell me a moment when you suddenly found yourself feeling invisible or internally unsettled by something that came down to a moment that you then read as racism, but I want it to happen between you and a friend.” I didn’t really care too much about what people were doing in Ferguson, at this level. I meant in their day-to-day working lives. And then, as people began to tell me stories, I began to see it in my own life, everywhere, happening, and I just started writing them down.
Are there other poems that you’re reading now, other poets that you’re thinking of now and might want to direct people to?
Dawn Lundy Martin, her work. She’s part of the Black Took Collective with Ronaldo Wilson and Duriel Harris, and I always find what they do, in terms of discussion of race, interesting, true, moving.
Lauren Berlant’s work “Cruel Optimism.” She’s a theorist at the Univeristy of Chicago. I find her work invaluable, because she has allowed me to sort of understand and also appreciate our own aspirational desire to belong, even when the belonging is knocking us down. We’re still knocking at the door. She’s written a lot about cruel optimism, things that we invest in that ultimately destroy us.
Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” is another book that’s been incredibly important to me, and it’s one of those books that you feel like everybody in America should read in light of what’s going on in Ferguson.
The poet R. Dwayne Betts is somebody who’s addressing race, but also addressing, specifically, the fate of black men in contemporary America, and he’s a fantastic poet and a beautiful writer.
I’m not exactly sure how to phrase this, but is there a question I should be asking? What is the question that isn’t being voiced?
I think there is a question, and I wish I knew what it was. When things like Ferguson happen, on a certain level I’m still stunned, even though I know it’s going on every day, and even though I know that there is a profound disconnect in terms of the humanity of the Other. I wrote in the book about a woman who says—and this really happened to me—“I didn’t know black women could get cancer.” That moment when you’re just like, “Wow. Not only am I invisible to you, I’m not human.”
When I’m walking around, I’m sometimes just perplexed at people who seem like everyday people, people who are on juries, who are in the police force, who are in control of my life in many ways. Who are in hospitals. Who actually are seeing something different when they see me. And it has nothing to do with just my skin color; the skin color reduces to something else. And there’s a question around that, but I don’t know what the question is. I really don’t know!
