Quote by Claudia Rankine: “Language is such that you struggle to exist simultaneously everywhere.”

Words never fully capture who we are in every context at once. When you speak or write, you make choices that exclude other versions of yourself. For people navigating multiple identities — race, gender, culture — this tension is not abstract; it's a daily lived reality.

Rankine published Citizen in 2014, the year that protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown. The book's meditation on racial microaggressions and Black grief felt urgently connected to the violence and visibility of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement.

Jamaican-American poet and essayist whose genre-bending collection Citizen: An American Lyric won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Her work explores race, belonging, and the accumulation of everyday indignity with formal innovation.