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I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyone’s read in some portion. By my middling review, I definitely don’t mean to take away anything from Claudia Rankine’s work—I know it made many people more cognizant about the racial issues in this country, and that’s always a great thing—but four years later, it felt a bit off-base for me.

This is another book for my Beyonce/Solange/Jay-Z class, which has now moved on to the latter artists. We’re reading this for our A Seat at the Table unit, which adds to my disappointment with this book, because I really loved the album! Back in 2016, Solange listed , namely due to Rankine’s straightforward descriptions of our nation’s racial grievances.

In 160 pages of essays(?), cultural criticism, and poetry, Citizen explores the gradient of white people who “cannot police their imagination,� and how their prejudice poses grave consequences for black Americans. While this is a novel, admirable feat, it seemed a bit selfish to equate police brutality and a real estate agent assuming you couldn’t pay for a house you wanted. To Solange’s point, I found the most clarity in Rankine’s personal accounts of microaggressions she’s experienced, and not in the darker occurrences she describes (such as the deaths of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson.)

There’s nothing wrong with Rankine sharing her experiences, but it seemed kind of cheap to share them in line with the story scripts, which detailed the deaths and abuse black people have endured at the hands of the state. Some of the scripts (Katrina, World Cup) seemed really imaginative, but most felt a bit too removed to convey the real emotions connected to state terror. Tonally, it almost seemed like she was writing two different books—one about microaggressions, and one about black trauma.

I’m really appreciative of this work, but just wish the sections with “more serious� issues were as lived-in and intimately observed as her complaints about not getting a subway seat. Citizen is an important, powerful, political work of art, but just not the one for me.