In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine highlights the problem of Black invisibility in White America. Throughout part one, Rankine compiles several situations in which Black people are not seen or acknowledged by Whites who, in America, are embody the dominant power structure. This invisibility takes on both literal and metaphorical forms and serves to point out that Black people are an afterthought for the White world. When the narrator witnesses a man knock over a young boy on the subway and keep moving, she illustrates a literal example of a White person not seeing a Black person who was right in front of them (17). The fact that the man kept on walking shows us that even when he was forced to confront the physical presence
