Citizen: Blog Post #1

Citizen’s discussion of Serena and Venus Williams includes the Zora Neale Hurston quote, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” How does this quote encapsulate the Williams sisters’ experience in the world of professional tennis? How does this quote relate to Citizen as a whole?

Image by The New Yorker via www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene

In Claudia Rankine's book Citizen, the discussion of Serena and Venus Williams includes the quote by Zora Neale Hurston, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." This quote explicitly encapsulates the Williams sisters' experience in the world of professional tennis with injustice and racism.

As being a black player in a white sport, Serena has been thrown against a sharp white background. People were angered at Serena simply because they "felt her black body didn't belong on their court, in their world" (Rankine, Section II). No matter how successful Serena is and how many victories she brought to the team, they can't help but believe she is "graphite against a sharp white background" (Rankine, Section II). Even though she did nothing wrong, her look as well as her human being caused the umpires of the games to make bad calls against her and supposed that she made the tennis game ugly.

In addition, this quote by Zora Neale Hurston is also related to the book Citizen as a whole. In Claudia Rankine's book, she and her friends recount a series of discriminatory actions such as a neighbor called the police after he saw a black guy walking back and forth, and he assumed "black" was dangerous. In addition, the speaker also gave us an example of a black man required to get out of her house by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she was expecting was "black."

Zora Neale Hurston's quote expresses clearly how white people hold implicit biases about black people and perceive them as not "real Citizens'' of the United States. The process besides that perspective is their collective action of implicit biases and discrimination against black people in the United States. White people often throw people of color against a sharp white background without thinking about the effects that will bring. As a person who experienced racism in the United States, I know it was painful and difficult to move out of that dark time.

I wonder if people know how racism actually feels? And what can it cause to people of color?

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