Regardless of what year we’re reading in, like the speaker, we begin to question: When are we? “Who did what to whom on which day?” the speaker asks, collapsing the details and sites of aggression in its narratives into a singular stream of interchangeable moments.

(The word progress never appears.) We’re meant to consider not only the who of the you alone but also the when, its duration, how time goes on and on and on. Perhaps it was impossible to consider when the book was still new, but Rankine also takes a capacious approach to time-a word that appears in 41 instances across the book’s lyric, prose, experimental scenes, and poetry. “You…want time to function as a power wash.” The you isn’t always either-or, white or Black, you or me or her. “You take in things you don’t want all the time,” she writes. In the clip, of course, Baldwin’s you is white America, but as commentators have often said of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen : An American Lyric, a you can also function a bit more capaciously.

In a video that routinely makes its rounds on social media, James Baldwin tells an interviewer, “You always told me it takes time.… How much time do you want for your progress?” Though the clip has been removed from its original context, Baldwin’s point is clear: you (whoever that might be, whenever it might be) are focusing on the wrong thing.

Rankine claudia