Students close the Grade 11 unit by reading a teen narrator's account of discovering Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) alongside a paraphrase of Rankine's tennis court scenes and closing direct address. Together the texts examine why Rankine addresses the reader as "you" throughout the book — a structural choice that places the reader inside the microaggression, inside the airport line, inside the body that the system has decided is legible only as a category. By making the reader the citizen, Rankine forces the question of what the lyric can hold that no other form can: the moment the system does its work not through a hearing or a law but through a glance, a sentence, a pause. The lesson completes the unit's essential question — when the systems that shape a place are visible, what is our responsibility, and our risk, inside them — through the specific case of a poem that makes visibility itself the mechanism, and the body inside the system the only site from which a witness can speak.

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