Health Inequity, Structural Racism, and the Trans-corporeal Ethics of Claudia Rankine’s Investigative Poetics

Claudia Rankine’s investigative poetry points to the many barriers for achieving both racial and health equity. Rankine confronts the racism inherent in our most powerful institutions, while also making a case against American individualism and exceptionalism. Her fourth collection of poetry, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), specifically critiques the role the media plays in bolstering institutional racism, largely through its perpetuation of a white racial frame and simplistic representations that serve to divide humanity rather than unite. Employing investigative techniques, Rankine accomplishes two interrelated tasks: First, Rankine breaks open the mediated frameworks that seek to erase the piercing physiological effects of racism and oppression. Second, Rankine demonstrates that the human is not a bounded individual, disembodied from cultural values and norms, but rather an embodied being immersed in a network of social, economic, material, environmental, biological, and political relationships.