Just Us
An American Conversation
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FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it
As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.
Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.
This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.
Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacArthur Fellowship recipient Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric) combines poetry, prose, and imagery in this unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America. Drawing on her own experience as a Black woman married to a white man, Rankine highlights the necessity of having uncomfortable conversations in order to understand both the experiences of other people and one's own needs and beliefs. In the essay "liminal spaces i," she recounts asking a white stranger about his understanding of white male privilege after he complained that his son couldn't use "the diversity card" to gain early admission to Yale, where Rankine teaches. In another essay, she contemplates asking her mixed-race daughter's white teachers about their "unconscious inevitable racism and implicit bias" at a parent-teacher conference. "Jos mart " features Rankine grappling with the limits of her own knowledge as she talks with a new friend about anti-Latinx racism. The discussion hits several snags, yet Rankine persists: "I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections." Other pieces incorporate commentary from Rankine's conversational partners and "fact checks" of her own assertions. The result is an incisive, anguished, and very frank call for Americans of all races to cultivate their "empathetic imagination" in order to build a better future.
