APRIL 20
CITIZEN
BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
Join us for a free Zoom event featuring Claudia Rankine in conversationwith John Freeman. Learn more at californiabookclub.com.
I write because the world seems out of order. One reads and reads and the language attaches to some dictionary’s idea of meaning in vague and inexact ways. In the end it all seems to be, as my daughter once said, triage language. Words address proximity to meaning but not the meaning itself. The word “meaning” is inadequate to the scope of experiencing a thing, its activity, its context, its history. A group of Black policemen brutalize a Black man at a traffic stop. Three days later, he dies in the hospital. How does one fully understand the brutality contained in that? How do we approach the
