Stop moaning and do something: the active vs the passive voice
The Jamaican-American poet and essayist Claudia Rankine won a slew of prizes for her book Citizen (2014). Her blend of emotive prose and personal recollection helped many people understand the challenges of being black in the US, where the experience is qualitatively different to that in the UK – a subject explored with erudition by the Nigerian-British writer Tomiwa Owolade. The murder of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, along with those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, made headline news; but many more casual examples of racism or double standards occur every day. In the Netflix true crime documentary The Perfect Neighbor, a white woman in 2023 makes constant complaints to the police about her innocent black neighbours and eventually shoots dead a black mother of four.
