The Progress That Can’t Be Erased

I t didn’t work .

That is the howl of grief at the core of Claudia Rankine’s new book, Triage : that all of the optimism and effort in service to the dream of true equality for Black Americans, all of Rankine’s own precise, subtle thinking—it failed.

“We have to learn to detach liberation from arrival,” she writes near the end of her lamentation.

“‘I might not get there with you,’ to quote the good doctor.

And ‘there’ might be nowhere.” This melancholy invocation of Martin Luther King Jr. qualifies as one of the book’s most hopeful moments.

Not long ago, the trajectory felt so different.

In 2014, Rankine’s landmark work, Citizen , seemed to capture the mood of millions of Americans after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, when protesters demanded the arrest of the officer who’d shot and killed Michael Brown , along with reforms in police precincts and far beyond.

The movement they galvanized, “ Black Lives Matter ,” was both bent on changing our society and confident of the possibility of doing so.

Citizen , published two months after Brown’s killing, seemed to channel that righteous fury.

Nimbly blending poetry, prose, and photography—“The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism,” Wallace Stevens predicted in 1899—it argued that for Black Americans, every social and professional encounter, violent, trivial, or otherwise, was distorted by race.

In her depiction of the exhausting vigilance this reality required, through a second-person voice cannily implicating her reader, Rankine created a new language to identify a problem as old as the United States.

The result was that rare thing, a simultaneous literary and cultural triumph.

Rankine won a raft of prizes, among them a MacArthur genius grant.

For a long time, the book’s iconic cover—a stark image evoking Trayvon Martin’s hoodie against a white backdrop—seemed to be on every other literate person’s nightstand.