Citizen Hack p 21-30

For my hack of Rankine’s Citizen I wanted to combine an academic mode of annotation (footnotes) with a more subjective and interpretive visual style. A consistent edit I made was placing constricting arrows pointing onto and crowding the text of the names of all black people mentioned and arrows pointing outward from the names of all the white people mentioned. I did this to symbolize the ever present “white space” and how it marginalizes black people. Sometimes the arrows from the white names literally pressed against those of that black names. I also used filling in and crowding of the text to represent the small spaces that are reserved for racial minorities, particularly Venus and Serena Williams. I pulled ideas from Hennessey’s YouTube videos and used the diction employed by Rankine to restate his ideas. In my footnotes I included some present day updated/supplemental information to give readers more context and perspective. The main goal of this hack was to emphasize that white space is the norm. From the television to the tennis court black people in America are consistently thrown against a white background and forced to function under the rules and norms of the majority’s structure.