by Adam Mah
On October 7, 2014, American poet Claudia Rankine published her mixed-media book-length poem and series of lyric essays, Citizen: An American Lyric. Five months later, on March 15, 2015, American rapper Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album, To Pimp A Butterfly. Both works explore race-related trauma in the contemporary black American experience through experimentations in form and genre. This essay focuses on how Rankine and Lamar play with the first and second-person perspectives, implicating their audiences in their works and revealing the associations implicit in their use. In his 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that black Americans must describe their experiences from within, or “under the veil,” to change how white Americans perceive them. It is the method that Du Bois claims to have used with Souls, as he writes in his introduction: “Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (Du Bois, viii). Similarly, Rankine and Lamar attempt to implicate their audiences under the veil using the second person “you,” placing the audience directly in the perspective of the black American. They also work with the historical associations implicit in the first and second-person perspectives: the first person “I” with personhood and the individual and the second person “you” with objecthood and the other. Rankine and Lamar confront the tension that originates from seeing the self as a “you” and an “I” simultaneously; a person and an object; an individual identity tangled with the cultural image of the black American. This sense of internal conflict or inward twoness can be identified as a present representation of the concept of “double-consciousness” as used by Du Bois, best elucidated in Souls:
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 3)
From this passage, double-consciousness can be understood as a sensation of inner conflict that creates an unstable sense of identity, caused by the disparity between how one sees themselves through the perspective of others, referred to as their “second-sight,” and how one sees themselves independently of others. This disparity, and therefore this double-consciousness, is substantial when others reject your personhood—when you inhabit “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Hence, manifestations of double-consciousness will continue to exist in America so long as its dominant culture remains racially prejudiced, for only then will the second sight of black Americans reflect a perception of themselves undistorted by prejudice. The goal Du Bois sets out to accomplish with Souls is for the black American “to merge his double self into a better and truer self, so black Americans can gain recognition as “co-workers in the kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 4). Rankine and Lamar share this aim, understanding double-consciousness as the product of the dominance of negative cultural signifiers associated with black Americans, and detrimental to their well-being. This essay compares the strategic use of the “you” and the “I” in Citizen by Rankine and the songs “u” and “i” from To Pimp A Butterfly by Lamar: first, as an effective technique to implicate their audiences under the veil, and second, as an exploration of the manifestations of double-consciousness within the black American experience.
Despite claiming to be “An American Lyric,” Citizen is written primarily in the second person, subverting the common expectation of lyric poetry to be narrated from the first person. Lyric poetry is also characterized by an emphasis on the expression of personal emotions, elevating their significance. Counterintuitively, the use of the second person in Citizen creates a reading experience more personal than could be achieved with the first person. In a New Yorker interview, Rankine commented on her decision to use the “you” over the “I”: “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.’” (Schwartz and Cole). Citizen includes many vignettes of racist microaggressions narrated with the pronoun “you” to this end, forcing the reader to be the recipient of the microaggressions depicted rather than a mere observer. Here is an example of one of the vignettes:
At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black!
I didn’t mean to say that, he then says.
Aloud, you say.
What? he asks.
You didn’t mean to say that aloud.
Your transaction goes swiftly after that. (Rankine 44)
The sudden exclamation, “I didn’t know you were black!” suggests that the way the manager perceives the speaker changes immediately when they meet, from an individual to “black,” a depersonalized manifestation of cultural signifiers. This vignette shows the creation of double-consciousness, contrasting how the manager regards the speaker on the phone versus in person. Utilizing the second person, Rankine removes the ability of the reader to reject the voice of the speaker outright and ensures the reader remains open to relating to the experience. If the reader identifies with the vignette, it will call to mind their own experiences of similar objectification. Even if the reader does not relate to the vignette, their unsuccessful attempt will still lead them to question their positionality. The use of the “you” forces the reader to try to relate to the racist microaggressions depicted in Citizen and either recognize their race-related trauma as collective or question their positionality. In addition, how the reader does and does not relate shows how pronouns are not universal but relative to their context.
Similar to the vignettes in Citizen, the second person “you” dominates the song “u” by Lamar, unconventional within popular music and the genre of hip-hop. “u” opens with screams and descending staircases of sound, throwing the listener into its unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere. Lamar begins by crying out the refrain: “Loving you is complicated, loving you is complicated.” He then starts his first verse with: “I place blame on you still, place shame on you still / Feel like you ain’t shit, feel like you don’t feel” (Lamar, “u”). Following what Rankine said in her New Yorker interview, the use of the second person forces the listener to try to identify themselves as the “you.” As Lamar has not distinguished the object of his rage, he invites the listener to feel like the recipient of his attacks, being blamed, shamed and put down. Next, Lamar vents anger at the “you” for being absent when their little sister became pregnant: “your little sister bakin’ / A baby inside, just a teenager, where your patience?” (Lamar, “u”), and it becomes clear that Lamar is referring to a specific individual. Finally, the beat sinks into melancholy as Lamar berates the “you” for the rest of the song in a voice of hurt and self-loathing, revealing that the conflict of “u” is internal, between two parts of himself represented by the “you” and the “I.” As Lamar criticizes himself through his second sight, the perspective of an imagined transcendent other, the conflict represents a form of double-consciousness. Even though it becomes clear that Lamar is the “you” and not his audience, the use of the “you” still implicates them in the work. Through the use of the “you,” the audience is implicated in the pained sensation of double-consciousness as Lamar objectifies himself in a destructive light.
Citizen also explores how the “you” and the “I” are associated with objecthood and personhood and how these associations represented within racist microaggressions manifest inwards as double-consciousness. In her New Yorker interview, discussing her decision to use the “you,” Rankine explained how the first and second person perspectives assumed their associations:
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. (Schwartz and Cole)
Since black Americans were once considered property and denied the power to use the “I,” referred to as only “you,” the ability to use the “I” represents the establishment of personhood. The line: “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane” echoes the importance given to the “I” by Rankine (Rankine 71). However, being constantly attacked by racist microaggressions in which they are objectified with the second person “you,” the speaker “I” has an unstable sense of personhood. In this sense, the “I” is “The pronoun barely holding the person together” (Rankine 71). Another microaggression in Citizen best illustrates how this tension manifests in the present:
A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interests and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. (Rankine 14)
The argument suggests that sometimes the seemingly equal or mutual relationship between black and white Americans regresses into its historical state, where white people have personhood, and black people do not. This vignette explains how the personhood of black Americans is vulnerable to being objectified and replaced by the cultural face of the black American, even within the context of friends. The collective vignettes show how racist microaggressions introduce a disparity into the black self; a double-consciousness sustained because one understands themselves as both an object and a person. Ironically, Rankine suggests that black self-assertion in America, though seemingly an act of defiance, actually results in the loss of the self when she writes: “You hold yourself black. You give yourself back until nothing’s left but the dissolving blues of metaphor” (Rankine 70). To “hold yourself black,” can be interpreted as an act of black self-assertion, which involves presenting all of the public meanings associated with blackness. But once one asserts these meanings, the white American other can only see the signifiers of blackness, the “dissolving blues of metaphor.” The individual drowned out of the picture. Citizen shows how double-consciousness arises from racist microaggressions founded on the objectified cultural image of the black American. Like Du Bois, Rankine wants to take her audiences under the veil to understand the threat of racial prejudice. Rankine does not find a clear solution.
The Lamar song “i” is contrary to “u,” suggesting that to prevent objectification and, therefore, racist acts and double-consciousness, one must develop self-perception and self-love independent of the gaze of others and the world. Contrasting the pained claustrophobia of “u,” the song “i” emulates an energetic live performance at a small venue in the hometown of Lamar: Compton, California. “i” opens with the rumble of a crowd, and a friend of Lamar hypes him up as he begins his verse:
I done been through a whole lot (Kendrick Lamar!)
Trial, tribulation but I know God
The Devil wanna put me in a bow tie (Make some noise, brother!)
Pray that the holy water don’t go dry
As I look around me
So many motherfuckers wanna down me
But enemigo never drown me
In front of a dirty double-mirror they found me (Lamar, “i”)
In this verse, Lamar prides himself on persevering through his struggles. His line: “The Devil wanna put me in a bow tie” suggests that the negative influences in his life—perhaps from American consumer culture—want him to indulge in a materialistic lifestyle, but he has not given in. The bow tie is typically symbolic of wealth, formality and success, but it can also be a restraining or choking force. Lamar rejects all of it, refusing to be held down by external definitions of success. Where on “u,” Lamar rapped, “if these mirrors could talk it’d say ‘You gotta go’” (Lamar, “u”), blaming himself for his faults through an imagined other, now he does not care to look at his reflection. Double mirrors are one-way: those behind it can see those in front; those in front can only see their reflection. His double mirror is dirty, implying that he does not care to see his reflection, though others can look at him all they like. Lamar also calls out the cultural influences that negatively define the image of black Americans:
They wanna say it’s a war outside, bomb in the street
Gun in the hood, mob of police
Rock on the corner with a line for the fiend
And a bottle full of lean and a model on the scheme, uh (Lamar, “i”)
Here, Lamar claims that “they,” perhaps referencing popular American media, want to associate black communities with violence and substance abuse. Lamar also calls out “the city,” perhaps representing the American state, for making empty promises: “How many times the city making me promises? / So I promise this, n**** / (I love myself)” (Lamar, “i”). Since America does not keep its promises, Lamar decides he can at least keep his promise to love himself. The refrain on “i”: “I love myself” (Lamar, “i”) is a direct contrast to that on “u”: “Loving you is complicated” (Lamar, “u”). Where on “u,” Lamar was lost in a state of double-consciousness, judging himself through the imagined lens of another, on “i” he asserts his personhood through his evaluation of himself, despite the cultural others that seek to objectify him. Lamar recognizes that cultural forces are at the source of the objectification of the cultural face of black Americans and suggests first trying to bolster a sense of self unaffected by however the white American other may perceive it.
In summary, the use of the first and second-person perspectives by Rankine and Lamar in Citizen and the songs “u” and “i” allows them to implicate their audiences into the veil and illustrate the presence of double-consciousness in contemporary America. Rankine and Lamar conclude that factors detrimental to well-being, like racist acts and double-consciousness, survive by the continued objectification of black Americans by dominant cultural influences. They achieve this by playing with the “you” as associated with objecthood, being subject to the will of others, and the “I” as associated with personhood, being in control of your fate. Using the “you,” Citizen shows how double-consciousness is perpetuated by everyday racist microaggressions, while “u” provides a glimpse into a pained psyche of double-consciousness. Rankine and Lamar understand these personal experiences as the product of a social system of objectification that perpetuates a negative image of the black American. As for ways to combat these issues, Rankine does not forward any particular one, tragically suggesting that black self-assertion still results in objectification. Lamar contrasts Rankine by proclaiming a philosophy of self-assertion and self-love, independent of how it may be perceived. Like Du Bois, Rankine and Lamar seek a future where black Americans are no longer objectified. A world that recognizes black Americans as individuals and not racialized signifiers.
Works Cited
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. McClurg, 1909.
Lamar, Kendrick. “i.” To Pimp A Butterfly, 15 Mar. 2015. https://youtu.be/tt2-GsPA9kk
Lamar, Kendrick. “u.” To Pimp A Butterfly, 15 Mar. 2015. https://youtu.be/XGC4QpDIpJc
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.
Schwartz, Alexandra, and Teju Cole. “On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from
Ferguson.” The New Yorker, 22 Aug. 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/seen-interview-claudia-rankine-ferguson