But there is a way in which black women are at the bottom. “ Race studies professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has talked about how the numbers are just higher for black men.

“I know in the States right now, movements such as Black Lives Matter have been grappling with this issue of whether those black lives also equal black female lives, and why the media doesn’t focus on the loss of black female lives as much as it focuses on the loss of black men. Rankine revised the poem for the second and third printings to include the names of Freddie Gray Jr and other male victims of racially motivated attacks who had lost their lives between the editions. This feels most acute when Rankine lists the names of black men recently killed by police in the US, including Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, with only a brief verse commentary on the facing page: “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying”. Soon this private world of solitarily experienced, silently swallowed incidents erupts into the sphere of public event and global notice. Echoes and repetitions across the prose poem enact a sort of systemic spread. Their power is incremental, collective, claustrophobic, in the text as in life. Soon, these small, private experiences – which Rankine gathered from her own life and from friends’ anecdotes – begin to accumulate. “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks,” Rankine writes. So, a black woman is jokingly hailed by a friend: “You are late, you nappy-headed ho!” Someone else confides: “Being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.” A man jumps a queue in a pharmacy because he “didn’t see” the black person ahead of him. The book recounts incidents of everyday racism, “calling them out”, as Rankine puts it, in the way she called out the bigot on the tennis court. “Brutal,” Rankine says, “because it calls up the reality of the brutality.” A prose poem that runs over 160 pages, it won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in March, and is brutally topical.

Rankine’s fifth book, Citizen, is full of these moments. The man’s cover – his support for the white “outsider” was so obviously racism masquerading as sportsmanship – was so flimsy as to seem laughable. Rankine is chuckling while she tells this story – of how the spectator promptly vacated his seat, how her intervention made her daughter cringe with embarrassment. “And I say to him: But, look – now it is competitive!” At this point Rankine caught his attention again. Before long, the match entered an edgy third set, so tight that it surpassed the hour mark, and all the while Rankine’s neighbour continued to urge on the Belarusian.

Rankine claudia