A twelve-year-old Black girl at Catholic school silently allows a white classmate to copy her exam answers.

A therapist screams 'Get away from my house!' when she opens her door to find the subject standing there.

Rankine introduces YouTube creator Hennessy Youngman's video arguing that Black artists can successfully market their anger.

Serena Williams erupts in rage at a US Open semifinal after a linesperson makes an unfair call against her.

Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki stuffs her outfit to physically mock Serena Williams's body at a public tournament.

A Black friend calls the subject a 'nappy-headed ho' as a supposed joke about her arriving late.

A white co-worker repeatedly confuses the names of the only two Black women who work in their office.

Philosopher Judith Butler explains that hurtful language is designed to exploit all the ways a person is present.

Rankine declares that the past cannot be left behind because it lives buried inside the body.

The subject stands in line at a drugstore and is completely ignored as though she does not exist.

CNN quotes from Hurricane Katrina coverage reveal that the government abandoned Black residents to the rising floodwaters.

A Black subject is wrongfully stopped by police because there is always only one guy who fits the description.

French soccer star Zinedine Zidane headbutts Italian defender Marco Materazzi at the World Cup final after a racial slur.

Twenty-three names of racial violence victims are listed one by one and gradually fade into the white of the page.

News breaks that a jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Citizen opens with a young Black girl silently absorbing racism at Catholic school and follows the narrator through a life of accumulated racial injury. The therapist incident and Serena Williams's televised outburst establish how Black people are expected to suppress justified responses to mistreatment. Rankine draws on Judith Butler's philosophy to explain why racist language causes such bodily harm, then declares that the past cannot be left behind because it lives inside the body itself. Chapter Six expands the frame to public tragedies—Hurricane Katrina, stop-and-frisk, and the World Cup headbutt—showing how racism operates at every scale of American and global life. The pool closes with the most devastating event in the book: the Zimmerman verdict, confirming that the legal system itself participates in the erasure of Black lives.

The headline moments of racism and resistance across Citizen.

The subject lies in bed at night looking out the window, recalling memories of past racial encounters.

A white close friend repeatedly calls the subject by the name of her Black housekeeper.

A white colleague tells the subject his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color despite so many great writers.

After screaming at the subject, the therapist collapses into repeated apologies: 'I am so sorry, so, so sorry.'

Rankine distinguishes between the performance of sellable anger and the genuine daily rage that accumulates from racial dehumanization.

A white woman blurts 'I didn't know black women could get cancer' directly to the subject.

A co-worker implies Black professors take more sabbaticals than others despite everyone sharing the same schedule.

A white cashier laughs while questioning whether the subject's credit card actually belongs to her.

The subject uses sighing and moaning as daily pathways through the pain of living as a Black person.

A blue flashlight enters a darkened room and shines its light directly on the subject's body.

Rankine meditates on the imprisoned existence of Black brothers as a tribute in memory of Trayvon Martin.

The Jena Six story unfolds through the charged moments just before six Black teenagers beat a white student.

The subject boards a crowded train and notices a Black man sitting completely alone despite every other seat being taken.

The subject deliberately sits beside the isolated Black man on the train as a conscious act of solidarity.

The subject is consumed by grief and anger as she tries to process the Zimmerman verdict.

This pool opens with the narrator in a quiet nighttime state, establishing a book built on accumulated memory and daily injury. The incidents here are quieter but no less damaging—a friend's accidental name confusion, a cashier's skepticism, a colleague's careless comment—each one a small crack in the myth of post-racial America. Rankine also interrogates the performance of Black anger through Hennessy Youngman's lens, asking what it truly costs to commodify pain. Chapter Six brings larger-scale tragedies into focus: the Jena Six, a meditation on Trayvon Martin's brothers, and a quiet act of solidarity on a crowded commuter train. The pool concludes with the narrator's private reckoning after the Zimmerman verdict, showing how a public injustice lands inside the private body.

Everyday microaggressions and acts of witness across the book.

The subject catalogs the immediate physical sensations after a racist encounter—adrenaline to the heart, dry tongue, clogged lungs.

The subject visits a new therapist's home practice for the first time and presses the small front doorbell.

Watching Serena Williams's televised outburst, the narrator recognizes the rage she herself has been taught to hold at a distance.

Rankine concludes that Wozniacki's physical mockery of Serena fulfilled a longstanding desire for Serena to simply be white.

A friend asks the subject why she always looks so angry, treating her natural expression as a social problem.

A real estate agent goes out of her way to announce how comfortable she is around Black people.

The subject's inner voice tells her to take her foot off her own throat just to get along.

The subject develops persistent headaches and reaches for sunglasses to soothe herself from the weight of racial pain.

The subject reflects on language as both a release and a force that encodes and covers the bodies it describes.

A man at a restaurant bar makes a sexualized remark directed at the subject's Blackness.

The subject goes home and pours a glass of red wine, hoping to sleep off the day's racial encounters.

A viewer watches Deryl Dedmon's pickup truck moving across a screen, its motion described as a condition of darkness.

A white English novelist implies that the subject, as a Black writer, should be the one to cover the Hackney riots.

Pronouns meld into one another—'I they he she we you'—as the subject's singular identity dissolves entirely.

A woman in a parked car drives away immediately upon seeing the subject approach in a fitness center parking lot.

This pool opens by grounding the reader in the physical body—the literal, visceral way racism registers in skin and breath—before the therapist scene crystallizes how racial violence erupts even in spaces designed for healing. Watching Serena Williams on television becomes a revelatory moment when the narrator recognizes in Serena's rage the feelings she herself has been taught to suppress. The middle of the pool captures sharper, quieter turning points: a friend's accusation of looking angry, a real estate agent's overcompensating comfort, and the inner voice instructing the narrator to stay quiet just to survive. Chapter Six introduces two pivotal external events—the hate crime against James Craig Anderson and a white novelist's loaded suggestion—showing racism operating as both physical violence and social pressure. The pool ends with the complete dissolution of selfhood as pronouns merge, before a final parking lot microaggression returns the reader to the inescapable ordinary.