The difference is that each of the pieces of art presented seem to grapple with race in a boldly intentional style, which is unlike Youngman's desire to draw a flower and allow it to be simply a flower. In a way, Rankine does embrace this fate throughout Citizen by interpolating the poetry with pieces of art that are entwined with race relations. Youngman sarcastically encourages viewers to embrace this fate in order to achieve success. This is a struggle for black artists specifically because their art will be read within a historical lens even when that is not the intention of the artist. Here, Rankine quotes Hennessy Youngman from a YouTube video in order to make a point about the inability of black people to separate their selves from their historical selves. ".if 'a nigger paints a flower it becomes a slavery flower, flower de Amistad', thereby intimating that any relationship between the white viewer and the black artist immediately becomes one between white persons and black property, which was the legal state of things once upon a time" (Citizen, 34) - Section II The temperament of this opening paragraph eases the reader into the abstract arena of the rest of the book as well. The ambitions of the narrator's great country are all but extinguished in this dark and lonely space.
The moonlight, symbolizing the goal of America's mission to land on the moon, is no longer present.
There is no location, but rather an overwhelming dark feeling. The first paragraph of Citizen offers an entrance into the complicated web of subjects that will tell the story in its pages. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor." (Citizen, 1) - Section I
"Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable.
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