Naivety Changes to Acknowledgement

Claudia Rankine opens her lyric with an experience she defines as a “domestic tragedy” (7). Her childhood friend has mistaken her for another black person again and refuses to acknowledge her wrongdoings. The encounter stings; leaving Rankine frustrated, hurt, and angry, but unable to confront her friend with her true feelings. In a scene of SLAM, Saul Williams breaks out in a freestyle rap in the middle of the prison yard to diffuse a potential fight between rival prison groups. Though only being in prison for a short period of time, he has become disappointed in the way the prison system animalizes African American men. During his rap he alludes to modern day slavery by saying he’d “rather sit and build than work and plow a field, worshiping a daily yield of cash green crops” (SLAM). To plow a field and worship cash green crops is a metaphor for how drug dealers work the streets tirelessly as they idolize and worship the money being made by selling the “crop,” which are drugs. Williams finds himself frustrated and angry with the way whites perceive African Americans daily, despite how hard they try to distinguish themselves from their preconceived stereotypes. Rankine describes this anger that both her and Williams experience toward whites as a “type of knowledge that clarifies and disappoints” (24). This type of anger clarifies during a provoking experience because it requires a specific type of energy that makes one’s presence known and worth paying attention to. Although no whites were in the prison yard during Williams’ rap, he uses this energy to assert his presence amid a senseless argument between his peers. Conversely, Rankine believes this type of anger disappoints because despite the amount of energy used to assert presence, no amount of presence can change how a group of people decide to perceive African American men and women. In Rankine’s experience, though she believed the friendship between her and her white counterpart was somewhat solidified, she will always be just another black person in her friend’s life. Both Rankine and Williams experiences support the operating metaphor of African Americans being present, but not genuinely being seen or heard while in the presence of others.