Because you will spend the next two hours around the round table that makes conversing easier, you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room. By Steffan Triplett getty images In a video that routinely makes its rounds on social media, James Baldwin tells an interviewer, You always told me it takes time.
Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. The Long Rally of Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ Citizen, the April CBC selection. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Youwant time to function as a power wash. You take in things you don’t want all the time, she writes. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. 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. “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful.
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