Take a couple minutes out of your day to watch “Cracking the Codes”  by Joy Degruy and pause at 2:20. After watching, think about these questions and tell me:

 

• What would you do in this situation? Would you confront the cashier? Would you step back and let it happen? Would you leave the environment?

• What do you think each individual person would do in this situation? Joy? Kathleen? Joy’s daughter? Another bystander? The cashier? The store manager, perhaps?

• Consider the consequences of each person involved. What would those look like for them?
• Finally, what is your definition of using your privilege? Is it sticking to the status quo? Being a bystander? Standing up for what’s right?

 

Being in such a suburban, white affluent community like Northbrook, this situation might not be something that you have ever experienced or have even thought you would experience. However, this scenario is just one example of, in my opinion, the starting point at which Claudia Rankine, author of “Citizen: An American Lyric”, would claim that pain worth measuring begins.

“Where does pain worth measuring begin? With a hangnail? With a stubbed toe? A sore throat? A needle prick? A razor cut?” (68).

–“The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss

Everyone has a different pain scale. They have a different 0 and a different 10, based on their life experiences and what specific pain they have endured. Also considered while looking at the pain scale are the scenarios/experiences in terms of category. According to Biss, “Hospice nurses are trained to identify five types of pain: physical, emotional, spiritual, social and financial” (69).

For someone, a 10 could be a paper cut. For someone else, a 10 could be a kidney stone or childbirth. It doesn’t matter how minor or major the situation is. The only thing that matters is that everyone feels pain.

When writing her lyric poem, Claudia Rankine uses “you”, “your”, “yours”, etc. Having read millions of books in my 18 years of living, using the second person is not a typical choice for an author to make. However, Rankine’s choice to do so made it much easier for me to really grasp the concepts that she wanted readers to take away when reading the poem.

Using the second person in “Citizen: An American Lyric” mentally puts the readers into the stories that she is using as examples throughout her poem. Without using the second person, it can be difficult for readers to empathize with what she includes because it’s not directed towards them specifically, nor is it something that they may have experienced before.

In a New York Times review of “The Fire Next Time” written by James Baldwin, Sheldon Binn writes, “On another and higher level, it can be related so the listener becomes virtually part of the experience, intensely feels the hurt and pain and despair, and yes, even the hope” (Binn 1).

Rankine’s entire lyric poem allows the reader to experience what it would be like to be involved in those situations first hand.

On page 18, Rankine includes a very powerful example. She explains how your new therapist is a trauma counselor and you are going to meet her for the first time in person but have been talking on the phone for quite some time. When you finally arrive at her house, you are greeted by your therapist who tells you to get away from her property and asks you what you’re doing there. Eventually, you muster up the courage to tell her that you have an appointment. She sits there, thinking, and everything stops for a brief second. She then says, “I am so sorry, so, so sorry” (Rankine 18).

This becomes powerful only because it may not be an example of physical pain, however, it is still an example of a type of pain that people experience every day but isn’t as obvious or recognizable as a sprained ankle or a broken arm.

Rankine begins measuring pain at all different levels, but she specifically measures pain in terms of how it affects someone mentally/emotionally rather than how it affects someone physically and noticeably.

Looking back at the example I used at the very beginning of my essay, that is another case of how pain can be measured mentally/emotionally. Joy’s sister-in-law stepped up and confronted the cashier about the way that she was treating Joy relative to how the cashier was treating Kathleen.

Kathleen didn’t confront the cashier because she punched Joy in the face or because she tripped her on the way out of the store. She stood up for her sister-in-law when she was being mentally taken advantage of simply because of her skin color, which is something she was born with and simply can not control.

Rankine also includes examples of pain that are neither mentally/emotionally sparked nor physically sparked. On pages 83-86, Rankine puts the readers into the perspective of the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

“Then each house was a mumbling structure, all that water, buildings peeling apart, the yellow foam, the contaminated drawl of mildew, mold. The missing limbs, he said, the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying facedown, arms outstreched on parlor floors”

–“Citizen: An American Lyric” Claudia Rankine, page 84

This tragedy that our country had to endure was sparked with Earth’s natural disaster, yet it still left people in lots of mental, emotional and physical pain.

So, where does pain worth measuring begin?

It begins when people decide to stop treating others with kindness. When people decide to simply stop treating others like they are what they are: human.