Claudia Rankine's Citizen begins and ends with images. Citizen's narrative begins with David Hammonds's "In the Hood," which is displayed on the cover. Though Hammonds's work, created in 1993, evokes images of lynching with its decapitated hood, it has also come to symbolize the deaths of Trayvon Martin and countless other young black men. 160 pages later, Rankine closes Citizen with two striking images of Joseph Turner's The Slave Ship: one printing of the entire painting and a close-up of fish attacking a drowning slave. Depicting the tossing overboard of bound slaves into the churning storm in order to lighten the ship, The Slave Ship is from 1840: years before slavery was outlawed. But yet nearly 200 years later, the existence of Hammonds's "In the Hood" illustrates that the oppression of blacks is still very much alive. Nearly 200 years later, America still does not value black lives.