The “historical self” and the “self self”
Last post, I wrote about the ways that racism, subjugation, and history imprisons everyone, the oppressed and the oppressor alike. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream and connected her discussion with a couple of the vignettes in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. While Smith focuses, predominately, on the white psyche, Rankine focuses on on both the white and the black psyche and the ways that our “historical selves” influence and hinder our interactions with one another.
Rankine uses the term “historical selves” in one of the vignettes in section one of Citizen. There, the speaker, addressing the reader, talks about you and a friend. The friend
argues that Americans battle between the “his-
torical self” and the self self.”
This battle causes tensions between you and the friend, even though you have a lot in common, because the weight of history bears down on both you, in all its ugliness. When this occurs, the speaker says, “sometimes your
historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and
her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.”
The “historical self” exists within us, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. It sits there, inside our psyche, rooting around in our skulls, pulling us away from truly intimate connections and denying us access to our “self self,” a position devoid of all of these lingering specters.
When one of you says something, sparked possibly by the “historical self,” “your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self.” That moment severs the shared connection, the mutual aspects that connect you and your friend.
Rankine has spoken about the intimacy within the encounters in Citizen. Speaking to Aaron Coleman, she said,
I had a friend say to me — he’s a white man and he was party to one of the interactions in the book — he said to me, “I think what you’re doing is pushing people away so that they can…
