“Rankine has emerged as one of America’s foremost scholars on
racial justice. . . . [To] a past we have avoided reckoning, Rankine
will be helping America understand itself, one conversation at a
time.”—The Associated Press
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.
